Inside one of the painted tombs, sound was tightly constrained, while inside the other, exceptionally long reverberation allowed sounds to travel between the burial chamber and the outside. At the same time, computer-vision analysis identified a blue demon painted on one wall as an unusually powerful visual focus. Together, the acoustic measurements and multimodal AI analysis suggest that two Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia were not simply decorated chambers but spaces that could have shaped how people moved, looked and experienced funerary rituals.
The comparison centers on the Tomba del Gallo and the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri, two Etruscan painted tombs dating to the 5th century BCE in the Necropoli dei Monterozzi at Tarquinia, Italy. The researchers combined acoustic measurements with computer-vision analysis of the tombs, architectural affordance modelling and agent-based simulations of perceptual movement.
The goal was not to reconstruct exactly what ancient visitors thought or did. The simulated agents had no ritual knowledge, goals or memory beyond their previous direction of movement. Instead, the simulations used measurable properties of the spaces to examine where those properties could bias attention and movement. The researchers describe the trajectories as heuristic models rather than predictions of how ancient visitors actually behaved.
For the visual analysis, orthographic renderings from photogrammetric models were processed using four types of information: local brightness contrast, color saturation, edge density and geometric curvature. These were combined into normalized saliency maps. Architectural features and painted panels were also scored according to their relationship to highly salient areas, their accessibility and their visibility from a reconstructed movement axis.
The acoustic component was different. Rather than simulating an imagined ancient soundscape, the researchers used formally documented measurements of the tombs’ acoustic responses. Early decay time and reverberation time were measured and then incorporated into the spatial analysis. The authors describe these measurements as an acoustic assessment of the physical properties of the tombs rather than a simulation of ancient sound.
That combination revealed a striking contrast.
The smaller tomb controlled attention
The Tomba del Gallo is the smaller of the two. Its steep entrance corridor is 6.75 meters long and 1.36 meters wide, leading to a burial chamber measuring 3.31 meters by 2.50 meters. The tomb is typically dated between 450 and 400 BCE. Its walls carried paintings including a banquet scene and musicians, while its best-preserved image shows a masked male performer dancing with a female dancer holding clappers, accompanied by a male double-pipes player.
The spatial analysis found relatively little visual stimulation along the entrance corridor. Saliency increased as the corridor approached the burial chamber, where changes in width, height and enclosure created a localized concentration of visual attention. The researchers interpret this threshold as a point where movement could slow and attention could become more focused.
Inside the chamber, high-curvature areas at architectural transitions and the paintings formed additional visual anchors. The modelling associated these locations with possible concentrations of actions such as offerings, directed gazes or ritual gestures, although the researchers explicitly treat these as relative likelihoods rather than predictions of specific ancient behavior.
The acoustics reinforced the difference between the approach and the chamber. Sound was found to form a bottleneck near the bottom of the entrance corridor, where it became trapped and expanded outside the tomb rather than into the burial chamber. Inside the chamber, reverberation was relatively limited at most measured frequencies. At 125 hertz, the early decay time reached 2.34 seconds, while frequencies of 250 hertz and above ranged between 1 and 1.5 seconds.
The researchers also noted an intriguing but unresolved correspondence. The longer reverberation at 125 hertz and below overlaps with frequencies that could have been produced by relatively few instruments, one of which is represented in the painting of the female dancer holding a clapper. But whether the painted instrument was intentionally connected to the tomb’s acoustic properties cannot be established.
The resulting interpretation is that the Tomba del Gallo emphasized visual order. Its entrance provided a relatively low-saliency approach before attention increased at the transition into the painted chamber. The researchers characterize this as a space in which meaning unfolded through ordered movement and controlled visual engagement rather than sensory excess.
The larger tomb behaved very differently acoustically
The Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri dates between 450 and 420 BCE. Its burial chamber is 6.20 meters long, 6.10 meters wide and 2.7 meters high, with a 13-meter-long entrance corridor measuring 2.5 meters wide. Its walls include a rear banqueting scene, a procession scene and several otherworldly figures, including the blue demon that gives the tomb its modern name.
The acoustic measurements revealed an environment dramatically different from the Tomba del Gallo. Reverberation was extremely long in parts of the chamber, with some measurements comparable to reverberation times documented in cathedral settings. The longest reverberation occurred toward the rear and left walls, where the banqueting scene is painted, while shorter reverberation occurred toward the right wall, where the demons appear.
Sound also crossed the boundary between the tomb and the outside. Sounds produced inside the chamber propagated through the entrance corridor toward the exterior, while sounds from outside could travel into the burial chamber. During the survey, the researchers reported that male speech originating outside the tomb could be easily heard from inside. The range of long reverberation times across frequencies led the authors to suggest that both lower-frequency sounds, such as drums or clappers, and higher-frequency sounds, including male and female voices, could have traveled between the chamber and the exterior.
The architecture itself differed from that of the smaller tomb. The Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri contains burial trenches and eight quadrangular depressions carved into its floor. The use of these so-called base marks remains debated, with possibilities including supports for funerary tables, sarcophagi or couches. The researchers also note that the entrance corridor was widened and that the burial chamber was deliberately spacious.
Those architectural features matter because the researchers argue that the two tombs’ different spatial arrangements contributed to their different acoustic experiences. The Tomba del Gallo was intentionally spatially diminutive, while the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri provided a substantially larger chamber.
The blue demon became the strongest visual focus
The second tomb’s acoustic intensity was accompanied by a very different visual pattern.
The computer-vision analysis identified the blue demon on the right wall as an extreme attentional attractor. Across the chamber, the modelling produced differentiated patterns of visual saliency. The procession on the left emphasized continuity and movement, while the right wall concentrated attention around the blue demon and another figure. The rear wall, dominated by the banquet scene, distributed attention more evenly among the participants depicted there.
This pattern led the researchers to propose that the tomb’s sensory organization differed fundamentally from that of the Tomba del Gallo. Rather than gradually organizing attention through spatial sequencing, the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri potentially introduced a much sharper perceptual disruption at the demon wall.
The researchers’ simulations combine these visual results with the acoustic measurements and reconstructed movement through the tomb. Their model depicts an approach through the entrance, a concentrated visual event at the blue demon and a later zone around the banquet scene where reverberation is particularly strong.
But the distinction between measurement and interpretation is important. The acoustic properties were measured directly. The blue demon’s status as a visual saliency peak comes from the computer-vision model. The subsequent interpretation of those combined conditions as producing particular emotional or cognitive states is a modelling exercise, not a direct measurement of what ancient people experienced. The authors explicitly acknowledge that direct access to ancient brain activity is impossible.
From sensory patterns to possible cognitive states
The researchers nevertheless used contemporary cognitive-neuroscience frameworks to explore what these different sensory configurations might have meant for perception.
For the Tomba del Gallo, the analysis associates its visual order, limited reverberation and spatial constraints with conditions linked in the cited neuroscience literature to alpha-band activity between 8 and 12 hertz. The researchers describe this cautiously as a state associated with relaxed alertness, sustained visual attention and suppression of irrelevant stimuli.
For the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri, the proposed sequence is more complicated. The model suggests an initial period of relatively ordered observation, followed by a stronger attentional response around the blue demon and then a possible shift toward immersive experience in the highly reverberant rear portion of the chamber.
The authors use alpha, beta/gamma and theta terminology to describe this proposed sequence. In their model, alpha-like observation occurs near the entrance, a beta/gamma response is associated with the visually intense demon wall, and theta-like activity is associated with sustained reverberation near the banquet scene. They describe this as a simulated neuro-acoustic response rather than evidence that ancient visitors actually displayed those brain-wave patterns.
That distinction is central to the study’s methodology. The AI analysis cannot recover the subjective experience of an Etruscan participant. Instead, it uses measured physical properties and formal models to describe sensory conditions under which particular kinds of attention and movement might have been favored.
A possible role for funerary ritual
The researchers also consider whether the unusual sensory characteristics of the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri might relate to how the tomb was used.
Archaeological evidence indicates that the tomb was looted, and only minimal cremated remains have been identified, with no evidence of intact human remains. At the same time, multiple animal sacrifices occurred in the entrance corridor during two separate periods, suggesting that the space was used across multiple decades rather than simply constructed and abandoned.
The chamber also contains the floor trench and base marks, while other remains include animal and cremated human material, pottery fragments and other artifacts. The researchers argue that the combination of these archaeological features, the unusual painted imagery and the distinctive acoustics could indicate that the tomb was used for funerary ritual rather than solely as a repository for the dead. They further propose that funerary or commemorative ceremonies may have taken place there periodically before the tomb was eventually sealed.
The authors stress that this proposal remains speculative. They say it requires investigation through acoustic documentation of additional tombs combined with AI-based techniques.
The two tombs suggest different ways of experiencing death
Taken together, the results lead to a contrast that runs through the entire study.
In the Tomba del Gallo, attention is organized through spatial progression. The low-saliency entrance corridor leads toward a more visually concentrated chamber. Architectural thresholds, paintings and changes in spatial form become points of attention, while the acoustic environment remains comparatively restrained.
In the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri, the researchers identify a different configuration. The larger chamber has exceptionally long reverberation, sound can move between the interior and exterior, and the blue demon forms an extreme visual attentional peak. The resulting simulations suggest a movement from more ordered observation toward perceptual disruption and possible sensory immersion.
The authors therefore argue that the two tombs represent different experiential strategies within Etruscan funerary architecture. The Tomba del Gallo privileges visual sequencing, threshold control and gaze discipline, while the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri potentially induces perceptual disorientation.
They interpret these differences as evidence that subterranean funerary spaces can be considered transitional spaces in which architecture, imagery and sensory conditions mediate experiences associated with life and death, order and chaos, memory and transformation. In this interpretation, the tomb is not simply a container for the dead but a space that could act upon the living participants through its physical and sensory organization.
At the same time, the study leaves a fundamental question unresolved: whether the distinctive acoustic properties of the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri were deliberately engineered by its architects or patrons, or whether they emerged from established architectural practices and materials. The authors identify intentionality as an open question requiring further research.
The methodological contribution is similarly cautious. The researchers argue that combining scientifically documented acoustics with AI-based visual saliency, architectural affordance modelling and agent-based trajectories provides a way to examine measurable sensory conditions without claiming to reconstruct ancient subjectivity. They propose expanding the approach to a larger acoustic corpus of Tarquinian tombs and developing more sophisticated multimodal AI models in future work.
For these two tombs, however, the contrast is already clear in the evidence presented: one space concentrates experience through controlled visual progression and relatively restrained acoustics, while the other combines unusually long reverberation with a sharply concentrated visual focus. The researchers interpret those different sensory arrangements as distinct ways in which funerary architecture could have structured the experience of people moving through the tombs.
The study was published in Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.
