One wagon-type seen in Volterra might be interesting to the research of roman travel-wagons.
As mentioned in the latest post some Etruscan ash-urns in Volterra has a certain type of wagon in their “front-scene”, a scene showing transportation into death.
The type of wagon on these urns is a covered wagon, Carpentum, (see photo right) in which the dead person is lying down, and it is most often shown with a cross on the wagon-side (only in one case is the wagon-side covered with what looks like a fish-scale-decoration). The fact that this wagon has something to do with the death-cult or ritual, is guarantied in the use of the wagon as decoration on ash-urns and since the wagon-type is (to my knowledge) only to be found in and around the Etruscan city of Volterra, we might deal with some kind of local ritual or at least wagon-type in the carvings found here.
The wagon-type, as it is seen on the Volterran ash-urns, is nowhere-else to be found in the Etruscan or Centraleuropean area on carvings, but in the “Kunsthistorisches Museum” in Vienna, Austria, an interesting ceramic-wagon is exhibited (see photo right). This wagon has the same characteristics as the Volterran carvings, but the cross on wagon-side is not to be seen in this model, which is why it might be difficult to conclude anything on the meaning and spread of this cross-ornament, if we only look at wagons of the exact same type as the ones in Volterra. Other wagons must be taken into discussion.
Here an interesting carving showing a type of cross-ornament on the wagon-side is one of the most famous carvings dealing with roman wagon-transportation; the carving from Maria-Saal, Austria, showing a roman travel-wagon (see photo left). This carving is used as an example of the roman travel-wagon and it is used in reconstructing models of this wagon-type, e.g. the heavy wagon on display in Cologne.
Whether the cross on this last wagon has anything to do with the ones from Volterra is not likely, but I do find it interesting that this particular ornament is deliberately showed on wagon-carvings from the later Etruscan period and the roman imperial times, and both representing some kind of death-transportation.
