Darcy Tuttle is a historian and archaeologist with interests in ancient Italian religion, funerary practice, law, and historical culture. She received her PhD in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2026. She also holds an MA in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in Classical Civilization from Yale University. She joins ISAW after a year in Italy, where she was the recipient of the 2026 Donald and Maria Cox | Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. She is also an active field archaeologist currently involved in two projects based in Italy: the Gabii Project and the Southern Etruscan Tomb Survey.
Her recently completed dissertation argues that many ancient Romans primarily viewed the afterlife as a community one hoped to join more than a place, like the heavens or the underworld, that one aimed to go to. This interdisciplinary project examines how membership within and exclusion from this community were negotiated and contested in the period between the first century BCE and the third century CE. It draws on epigraphic, legal, archaeological, historical, and literary evidence. While at ISAW, she will be developing this research into a monograph outlining a social history of the Roman afterlife.
While her dissertation focuses on the Roman Principate, Darcy's research interests span the fourth century BCE to the fifth century CE and encompass Etruscan studies as well as cultural contact between the Roman Mediterranean and Central Asia. She is also currently working on an analysis of the role of elite multi-generational chamber tombs in central Italy from the fourth to first centuries BCE as sites for engaging with both the past and the future. This research builds on a study of the Tomb of the Scipios that she recently published in the Journal of Roman Studies.