Travellers who walked into an Etruscan settlement such as Veii or Cerveteri in the early 6th century BC would find themselves in a relatively familiar urban environment. Walls, gates, houses, roads, temples, water infrastructure would all be present. It would not feel very different from one of the contemporary Greek colonies of southern Italy, or from Athens and Corinth. The classic Mediterranean urban settlement—polis in Greece, urbs at Rome, and city-state used generically—is nevertheless not the only possible solution for aggregations of humans; it was the product of a series of choices over time.
Anyone studying Etruscan history must work with at least two rather different kinds of chronological schemata, neither of which uses the term ‘Etruscan’. Where do these chronological classifications come from? Secure dating is rare, and on its own can only date an object not a context. So archaeologists work with sequences, usually derived from careful stratigraphic excavation, and typology, which depends on careful analysis of objects from individual sites and across whole regions, to get a sense of relative order. From that point, tools such as radiocarbon dating or dendrochronology can begin to help.
There is an understandable tendency to divide this relative order into periods. The old division into Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age was first developed in the 19th century and is still used today, though with increasingly fine differentiations and divisions. Often there is one key site which gives very good data for a particular phase. This then becomes the type site. In Etruria, one type site which has dominated the terminology is a cemetery with about 200 burials, mostly cremations, with the ashes in ceramic containers, from Villanova near Bologna, first found in 1853. This site was recognized to offer a kind of burial behaviour which could be found elsewhere across a large area of Italy, which was thereafter called Villanovan. In 1937, in order to differentiate a phase which was transitional to Villanovan and seemed chronologically earlier, the term proto-Villanovan was coined.
So an object from Veii in Etruria might be described as a Final Bronze Age proto-Villanovan object, or a Late Early Iron Age 1 Villanovan object belonging to Veii sequence 1B Toms (the last referring to the author of the standard classification and periodization at Veii, which superseded all previous efforts) dated to (give or take 25 years or so) 900 BC.
For the non-expert, this is bewildering and off-putting, so we will avoid this forest of terms, but in so doing one should not forget that the work that went into creating this level of accuracy was phenomenally difficult, and hugely valuable. But where does it leave the Etruscans? It is extremely important to note that there is no such people as the Villanovans. ‘Villanovan’ describes a pattern of cultural behaviour. Translating this into an ethnic identity makes as much sense as talking about the bowler hat people, or the iPod people. The question of Etruscan origins is lurking here again. In the 19th century, it was not clear whether the people buried in the cemetery at Villanova were the same as the people who would subsequently occupy Bologna in the 8th to 6th centuries, whom we are happy to call Etruscans. And what then about the relationship between proto-Villanovan culture and Villanovan culture? Recently, it has become clearer that there are real problems of perspective here. Proto-Villanovan and Villanovan culture in their broadest senses can be found over much of Italy, right down into Calabria, but the version of Veii and the version at Tarquinia 40 km away are subtly different. Furthermore if one does not believe in radical population migrations, but takes the view that the majority of the population from say 1200 to 600 BC were local to the area, what prevents us from calling them Etruscans all the way through?
One reason why this is important is that, at present, we identify the Etruscans only with their highly urbanized form, the city-state mentioned at the beginning, and this gives a degree of weight and teleological significance to that set of choices. Urbanization becomes the characteristic which defines the Etruscans; and if it is associated with the arrival of the Greeks, as it has been in the past, then we easily replace an account in which the Etruscans arrived from elsewhere with an account in which the model of culture which marks the Etruscans out from the possessors of Villanovan culture comes from elsewhere. If there is no strong ground to believe the population to have been changed radically by immigration, then there is an argument for seeing a series of developments in the use of landscape and resources, which relate to social and political changes, all taking place over a long period from the Recent Bronze Age to the 7th and 6th centuries BC.
Early Bronze Age settlements were largely on flat open sites; in northern Italy this culture is called Terramare culture and included substantial highly regular villages. Further south the settlements are more irregular and less organized. From the 13th century onwards, we see a shift in Etruria towards more defensible sites. Elsewhere in Italy, more dramatic changes can be seen—the complete disappearance of the Terramare culture in around 1200 BC for instance. It may therefore have been a period of some turbulence, and it is interesting that the preceding period has been identified as one in which greater social differentiation can be seen, and that in Etruria, in addition to the move to defensibility, we also see a greater emphasis on the production, use, consumption, and deposition of bronze. Social hierarchy requires a material underpinning, and bronze may have become increasingly important, but social hierarchy is also fragile. Certainly we know that before 1200, some Mycenaean pottery can be found in Italy, indicating trade links with the eastern Aegean. In the 12th century, much of the infrastructure of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed.
Sovana is an example of one of these settlements at the beginnings of this new phase. Although the site, not far from the Lago di Bolsena, shows signs of activity from much earlier in the Bronze Age, it is only in the Final Bronze Age that we find signs of a permanent settlement. The settlement is interrupted around 900 to be later reoccupied under the influence of Vulci in the 6th century. Not far away, Sorgenti della Nova shows a similar pattern of occupation. Covering perhaps 15 hectares and with a population around 1,500 at a maximum, the site has produced evidence of animal husbandry as well as crops. There were various house forms, including one very substantial house, rock-cut grottos, possible cult activity, and pottery kilns. Luni sul Mignone, near Blera, is slightly different in that it shows a rather clearer and more substantial earlier phase from at least the middle of the second millennium, but then shows the same focus on the defensible area of the site, and abandonment in the early first millennium. Finally, San Giovenale, again not far from Blera, shows much stronger signs of continuity from an equally early phase across into the Iron Age and the Etruscan period.
The variability of the settlement pattern is coupled with an increasingly differentiated material culture. It was a slow process, but the larger question is the extent to which it was a collective process. This is one of the hardest questions to answer because the material culture is still insufficiently distinct to permit one to see one site influencing another, but there are signs of imports and trade movements, especially from the north and the area of the Danube. A key site which connects the areas is Frattesina. Larger than many contemporary sites in the Po Valley it shows substantial productive activity in ceramics, amber, and glass. Ivory and an ostrich egg show trade with the middle east or north Africa. Frattesina is hugely important as a link between the late Bronze Age and the Iron Age, and it gives a hint as to the international opportunities and the potential markets and economic interactions which underpinned the transformation in Early Iron Age Etruria.