Rare Salona Face-Down Burial Packed with Glass and Gems

A rare Salona face-down burial—Grave 162 at Hortus Metrodori in the western necropolis of ancient Salona near Solin, Croatia—has drawn fresh attention after the site’s fifth excavation season. The individual was laid prone (on the stomach) with a rich assemblage of glass, ceramics, engraved gems, and bronze fragments. Season leads Lea Čataj (Croatian Conservation Institute), Nina Švonja (Archaeological Museum in Split), and Sara Popović (Arheoprojekt) are named on the museum’s Hortus Metrodori 2026 note; English coverage followed in Croatia Week and Arkeonews.

Grave goods reported with the burial include three glass bottles, one small glass vessel, three balsamaria (one date-shaped), four ceramic vessels, two engraved gems, and bronze fragments. Bioarchaeology sits with the Anthropological Centre of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts; age, sex, and any pathology for the Grave 162 individual are not yet published. The prone rite plus a wealthy kit undercuts any simple equation of face-down burial with poverty or social exclusion.

This season the team investigated 32 graves—16 cremations and 16 inhumations—bringing the Hortus Metrodori total investigated to 152. Grave 162 cut through remains of an earlier destroyed wall once thought to mark a funerary-plot boundary north of the murazzo; first-century graves over that negated wall suggest the wall may predate the murazzo. Funded by Croatia’s Ministry of Culture and Media, the work adds a concrete data point for changing Roman funerary practice at the Dalmatian capital without inventing a mystery-cult frame.