Darcy Tuttle

M.A., Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, UC Berkeley, 2021
B.A., Classical Civilization, Yale University, 2016

I am a social historian and archaeologist with interests in Roman religion, law, and funerary practice.

My dissertation, "Ghost Justice: Community, Crime, and the Roman Cult of the Dead (1st c. BCE – 3rd c. CE)," explores how ancient Romans negotiated and contested access to the afterlife via prayer, speech, law, and violence. I draw on archaeological, epigraphic, legal, and literary evidence to argue that, for many ancient Romans, the underworld was primarily conceived of as a divine community rather than a place. This community’s membership was policed with mechanisms similar to those used to regulate the communities of the living. I demonstrate the existence of ideals of collective justice, wherein the dead themselves decided whom to welcome. But I also show how the living, including agents of the state, often sought to impose their own justice upon dead through capital punishment, the denial of burial and cult, the violation of tombs and corpses, and cursing. This project has received support from the Mario Del Chiaro Center for the Study of Ancient Italy at UC Berkeley as well as the American Academy in Rome’s Donald and Maria Cox | Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize.

My other areas of research include Etruscan studies and cultural contact between the Roman Mediterranean and Central Asia. Current projects related to these interests include a chapter on the iconography of so-called “toilet trays” from the Greater Gandharan region and ongoing research into the phenomenology of chamber tombs from the fourth to first centuries BCE in central Italy. This work builds on research from my M.A. thesis (also completed at UC Berkeley) on the Tomb of the Scipios. I am also an active field archaeologist with involvement two projects based in Italy: the Gabii Project and the Etruscan Tomb Survey.

Before rejoining academia, I worked for several years as a legal researcher in Chicago. Though I have enjoyed California’s windchill-free winters, I remain a dedicated White Sox fan and defender of deep-dish pizza.