Artificial intelligence is helping researchers reconstruct the sensory experience of Etruscan tombs built more than 2,400 years ago, revealing how darkness, painted walls, architecture and sound may have shaped ancient funerary rituals. The study suggests that some tombs were designed not simply to hold the dead but to influence how living visitors moved, looked, listened and responded inside them.
Lead author Maurizio Forte and his colleagues examined two painted tombs from the fifth century B.C. at Tarquinia in central Italy. The team combined artificial intelligence with acoustic measurements and detailed 3D models. The two burial chambers produced strikingly different experiences, researchers found.
One appears to have guided visitors through a controlled visual journey. The other created intense echoes, limited visibility, and dramatic painted imagery that may have produced a more disorienting experience.
AI tracks where visitors may have looked
Researchers studied the Tomb of the Rooster and the Tomb of the Blue Demons, both part of Tarquinia’s ancient burial landscape. The city is best known for its Etruscan heritage, although recent excavations have also revealed evidence of Tarquinia’s later development as a major Roman settlement.
Instead of treating their paintings as separate works of art, the team examined how the images interacted with architecture, movement, lighting, and sound. Painted burial chambers are among the most important sources for understanding Etruscan funerary culture, with another painted Etruscan tomb uncovered at Tarquinia offering rare evidence of ancient imagery and burial practices.
Computer vision software identified areas most likely to attract attention. The system measured features such as color contrast, brightness, edges, and the shape of architectural surfaces.
Researchers then combined those results with simulations showing how people might naturally move through each tomb. The virtual visitors were not programmed to perform specific rituals. They simply responded to factors such as narrow spaces, strong visual features, and changing acoustic conditions.
The researchers stressed that the simulations do not recreate exactly how ancient Etruscans behaved. Instead, they show how the physical design of a tomb could have encouraged certain patterns of movement and attention.
Two tombs created very different environments
The smaller Tomb of the Rooster contained a steep entrance passage leading into a compact painted chamber. AI analysis found relatively little visual stimulation along the corridor. Attention increased sharply near the doorway and inside the burial chamber, where paintings showed dancers, musicians, and banqueting scenes.
Acoustic tests showed that most sounds did not linger for long inside the chamber. Researchers said this clearer sound environment may have allowed visitors to focus more easily on the paintings and people around them. The Tomb of the Blue Demons produced a very different result.
Its burial chamber is much larger, and its walls feature a procession, a banquet, and supernatural figures. A blue-colored demon painted on one wall emerged as one of the strongest visual attractions identified by the AI system. At the same time, acoustic tests revealed unusually long echoes in parts of the tomb.
In some areas, sounds reverberated for several seconds. Researchers recorded particularly strong effects toward the rear of the chamber, where a banquet scene appears. The study suggests that voices, music, clapping, or other ritual sounds could have become difficult to locate precisely inside the room. Other discoveries are also providing new evidence about Etruscan burial traditions. Archaeologists recently uncovered an intact Etruscan tomb near Rome, preserving a rare burial context untouched by ancient looters.
Sound, darkness and ritual
Researchers also considered how ancient lighting may have changed the experience. The tombs were underground and would have required artificial light. Earlier research suggests candles or similar sources may have illuminated burial chambers, while torches could have been used in entrance passages. Under dim and shifting light, only parts of the larger tomb may have been clearly visible at any moment. The team argues that the combination of restricted vision, strong echoes and dramatic paintings could have heightened emotional responses during funerary ceremonies.
The study also explores possible links between these sensory conditions and brain activity associated in modern research with attention, alarm and immersive states. The authors caution, however, that ancient brain activity cannot be directly reconstructed. These models describe possible responses to the environment rather than proven reactions of Etruscan visitors. The research adds to a growing use of artificial intelligence in archaeology. Scientists have also used AI to help decipher an ancient Herculaneum scroll that remained unread for nearly 2,000 years.
The researchers say the findings challenge the idea that painted tombs were simply decorated burial chambers. Instead, the two sites may have functioned as carefully structured sensory environments. Architecture directed movement, paintings attracted the eye, and acoustics altered the way sound traveled. That combination, the study argues, may have helped turn the act of entering a tomb into a physical transition between the world of the living and the realm associated with the dead.
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