Before our project Etruscan Tuscania was best known for its great family tombs with inscribed sarcophagi of the 4th-2nd centuries BC, but the survey evidence shows that the Etruscan landscape was most densely settled in the 6th century BC (219 sites), coincident with the process of urbanization. The frequency of ‘off-site’ material indicates that Etruscan agricultural activity extended over the greater part of the surveyed area. Little survives of the remains of the Etruscan town, but the richness of Etruscan material immediately south of the city walls indicates a suburban extension of it. The development of Tuscania implies that the control of minor centres by major centres (or rather, the control of less powerful by more powerful families as social and economic inequalities became increasingly marked) was one of the earliest features of Etruscan urbanization. The Archaic Etruscan phase was followed by a marked, though not dramatic, population decline in the Later Etruscan phase (129 sites), the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Activities at Guidocinto, a small but long-lived Etruscan farm we excavated near Tuscania, included the production and processing of oil, wine, and wool, products that enhanced elite lifestyles and provided them with valuable resources for exchange and trade.

This paper discusses the origins and the transmission of the alphabet to the peoples inhabiting the lower and central Tiber river valley. While some consideration is given to the development of the alphabet of Etruscans, as the driving force behind the dissemination of writing and literacy in central Italy, and to the alphabet(s) of Sabellic speakers, the focus is squarely on Latin and its sister language/dialect Faliscan. The paper aims to flesh out alphabetic reforms, signal possible areal developments, and identify major regional/chronological developments in the period before movements toward more standard orthography and letterforms in the two writing systems. The paper also maps out the diversity of epigraphic forms and their functions, which, it turns out, are much less homogenous in Latin and Faliscan than is the case in Etruscan during this same time period. Ultimately, the investigation reveals a vital epigraphic cultures in Latium and in Falerii that were adapting to the changes in social, political, and economic realities of the period, and that were, as a result, beginning to forge their own regional identities.

Luxurious dress and jewelry were important in public self-representation in Perso-Anatolian and Etruscan cultures. What distinguishes jewelry use in these societies is that jewelry was equally significant for elite males as it was for females. In fact, most of the visual evidence for jewelry in the East comes from ornaments worn by soldiers, court officials, and kings. Persian, Anatolian, and Lydian women are rarely represented in the surviving art, making it unusually difficult to reconstruct the jewelry styles and types they favored. Etruscan men, too, showed themselves with rings, bracelets and armbands, necklaces, and earrings. This chapter examines the male adoption of jewelry and explores the meanings of personal ornaments in both cultures.

In the 1950s, University of Pennsylvania archaeologists recovered over fifty pieces of wooden furniture from three royal tumulus burials and the city mound at Gordion, Turkey. Tumuli MM and P (eighth century BCE) contained thirteen tables and three serving stands with characteristic Phrygian features. The style and joinery of the tables tie them to a long trajectory of wooden tables from the ancient Near East. A variety of fine wooden objects was found in two tombs excavated in 1972 at Verucchio in northern Italy (late eighth through early seventh centuries BCE). The finds from tombs 85 and 89 include wood tables, footstools, thrones, boxes, and other organic materials. Three tables from tomb 85 had legs attached to the table top with a version of the collar-and-tenon joinery used for the Gordion tables. Rarely are ancient wooden artifacts recovered in good condition; the finds from Verucchio and Gordion provide a large and important corpus from the early first millennium BCE. This paper examines the similarities (and differences) between Gordion and Verucchio wooden furniture and investigates the possibility of interaction between Near Eastern and Italic woodworking schools in the eighth through the seventh centuries BCE.

Whereas the previous chapters dealt with the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on Roman law in terms of method, this chapter deals with the influence with regard to a substantive issue, the notion of person. The Roman jurists became interested in the abstract use of the notion of person in the slipstream of the philosophers, who combined the Greek understanding of person with a more indigenous, that is Etruscan, understanding thereof. ‘Person’ thus understood would become one of the central notions in Roman law and beyond.