Summary Cultural decline as a result of the Roman conquest is usually invoked to explain the gradual disappearance of Tarquinian tomb paintings during the third century BC. By contrast, this paper argues that, first, the late tomb paintings of Tarquinia markedly differed from their predecessors by decorating individual burials (fragmentation), as opposed to entire chamber tombs, which should be seen as a culturally meaningful development in the iconographic approach towards representing the deceased; and that, second, the disappearance of this time‐honoured type of monument be seen as part of wider changes in the ways in which Tarquinian and other Etruscan elites chose to materialize their ideologies during the cultural and political realignments of the period of the Roman conquest.

About 1973, an Israeli amateur diver and fisherman discovered bronze guns on the sea bed close to the shoreline, somewhere in the proximity of Haifa or Athlit. He had a friend with a tractor, and they attached a long rope to the guns and dragged the two pieces one by one over the sea bed up to the shore. The discovery came to the attention of the appropriate Department, probably of the University of Haifa, and divers carried out a more professional search on location. Parts of a spoked wheel and some loose timber were recovered which were part of a guncarriage, matching some pieces still attached by encrustation on the re-inforce of gun No. 236. No other remains of a vessel etc. could be found on site. It is said that the fisherman and his partner intended to donate these guns to the Maritime Museum but could not come to an agreement, a legal wrangle followed, and gun No. 236 ended up in the backyard of the Maritime Museum, whilst gun No. 235 remained with the fisherman and his partner. (The numbers are my own registry numbers.)In the spring of 1976, I was asked to restore some Bedouin boats at the Museum. I was there for three months, during which I saw gun No. 236 for the first time. Its weight had caused a depression in the tarmac, marine encrustation remained for the larger part still on the gun and some timbers of the carriage were lying about in the vicinity. Little interest or information was available and I began to remove the dry and splitting encrustation on the gun. At this stage I noticed chisel-marks covering large parts of the gun, especially the chase. They had all the appearance of a rather forceful and inconsiderate removal operation of the marine encrustation. These marks were, however, under the encrustation and therefore caused before the gun came to rest on the sea bed.

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