This chapter examines cemeteries to investigate the complex dynamics of ethnogenesis and the construction of collective identity and elite group ideologies in central Italy during the Early Iron Age (EIA) and the so-called Orientalizing period. It overviews dynamics of interaction between Etruscans, Greeks, Phoenicians, and other people from the East in the Tyrrhenian context. The chapter investigates the notion of symbolic violence as proposed by Bourdieu and Godelier as a central aspect of collective group as well as individual strategies, and of power rituals in the EIA and the Orientalizing period in Etruria. As the funerary ideology of the Etruscan EIA recalls a picture of sociopolitical dialectics between collective trends and specific group or individual features and between conservatism and innovation in constant interplay with the criteria of status, gender, and age, there is no shortage of ambiguities and differences. Hut-shaped urns are of crucial importance for understanding the socio-ritual and gender dialectics, even if they are relatively uncommon.

As far as the literary sources for Etruscan history are concerned, it must be realized that Greek and Roman historical writers were concerned exclusively with the Greek and Roman views of the episodes. These episodes brought Etruria into contact with the Greek states and with the growing power of Rome. The geographical distribution of the Villanovan culture covers southern Etruria and Tuscany south of the Apennines, central Emilia and the eastern Romagna to the north, Fermo in the Marche, and parts of Campania. The exchanges between Etruria and the outside world that had begun during the first half of the eighth century were subsequently put on a more solid footing by the activities of the second generation of Western Greeks. The monumental tumuli, erected in the Orientalizing period over multiple chamber tombs containing exotic luxury goods, are replaced by more numerous and more modest single-family chambers.