the territory of the diocese of Ajaccio was extended to the whole of Corsica. At the end of the Ancien Régime, the bishop no longer lived in Aléria, but in Cervione. Archaeology Hundreds of archaeological sites on Corsica offer a view of an island that has been occupied continuously since about 6500 BC and has never been isolated. It was common for populations on Corsica to maintain contacts (especially trade contacts) with other communities on the Mediterranean; the indigenous people of Corsica therefore might have come from anywhere on the Mediterranean. The various archaeological museums on the island preserve ample remains from the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age, with some interpretive or circumstantial variation in the dates. Only in the Iron Age (700 BC-) were there any historians to distinguish between the indigenes descending from previous populations and the more recent colonists. Although no settlements of urban density preceded the first Greek colony, Aléria is unlikely to have been altogether unpopulated. A chance find of an ancient rubbish disposal pit at a location called Terrina about from the Étang de Diane gives some information regarding pre-Roman habitation. The pit was excavated between 1975 and 1981 by G. Camps, who found four levels and named the site after the most important, Terrina IV. Terrina IV features a Middle Neolithic settlement in which the use of cattle and pigs were, in contrast to the rest of the island, which kept mainly goats and sheep and grew grain. The Chalcolithic, approximately 3500–3000 BC, arrived by easy transition. The population of the site manufactured arsenical copper and copper goods. The visible antique habitations at Aléria date to the Iron Age and are consistent with the common history. Although ruins on the promontory were noted by Prosper Mérimée in 1839, they were only excavated in 1955 by Jean Jehasse and Jean-Paul Boucher. By 1958 the excavators had uncovered the forum of the Roman city of Aleria, first occupied in the 1st century BC. A pre-Roman, Etruscan necropolis was then discovered to the south (in Casabianda) containing more than 200 tombs. It was excavated between 1960–1981. The necropolis had been in use mainly from the 6th to the 3rd centuries BC and was abandoned altogether with the construction of the Roman city, which had a cemetery to the north. No artifacts that were identifiably Etruscan have been found to have been from before the