Patterns of Etruscan Urbanism

Abstract

This paper examines the patterns of Etruscan urbanism by the innovative use of newly available rural data, employing rank size, and indices of centralization. The detailed case study looks at the development of urbanism of pre-Roman Etruria where both robust and delicate urbanism were present alongside one another. To achieve this end, the paper will draw on the complementary features of two recent articles-Redhouse and Stoddart (2011) and Palmisano et al. (2018)-to provide a synthesis that both examines the large places and the supporting rural settlement. The territorial boundaries of the major urban places were predicted by the XTENT model in the first article. The cumulative numbers of rural settlement (and other proxies of population) over time were examined in the second article. This paper will look at the regional variation in landscape organization within the predicted territorial boundaries of the major robust centres and the more delicate transitory centres, as well as the buffer zones in between. At least three phases of boundary development can be examined, equivalent broadly to the Iron Age, Orientalizing/Archaic and Post Archaic periods, seeking to match these with the correspondingly dated rural settlement. The results will be critically examined in terms of broader knowledge of the economic and political development from current fieldwork in Etruria. The ethnographic analysis of Kopytoff (1989) will also be applied to assess the application of the internal African frontier to the central Italian context. In this way, the quantitative will be matched with the qualitative to provide a deeper understanding of urban development in an under-assessed example within the Mediterranean world.

Radiocarbon Dated Trends and Central Mediterranean Prehistory

“…There may or may not be a priori biases in research interests for scholars within a given cultural context, but there are almost certain to be different research traditions, attitudes and funding priorities affecting work when different cultural contexts are compared. For this reason, it is not appropriate to compare, for example, Neolithic and Iron Age activity levels on absolute terms, although on-going work is already redressing this imbalance by engaging more with scientific dating, and comparison of radiocarbon evidence to other quantitative proxy measures of human activity and demography, such as surface survey (Stoddart et al, 2020(Stoddart et al, , 2020aStoddart et al, 2020bStoddart et al, , 2020c and aDNA. We do, however, argue that relative changes in activity over the shorter term, or coeval comparisons of activity between neighbouring regions, remain valid because there can be no point in time when such biases suddenly take hold.…”

“…A further profound change took place at the transition to the Iron Age in Etruria, when settlement concentrated on larger plateaux or alternatively neighbouring hills with a significant extension of 125-180 ha or 40-90 ha in case of smaller centres (Pacciarelli, 2000, p. 279); in some cases (e.g., Tarquinia) these were already occupied from the last phase of the Final Bronze Age (Bietti Sestieri, 2010). There has been much discussion regarding the politics of how this process was accomplished, with interpretations ranging from collective action to the authority of a restricted leadership (see Stoddart, 2010;Stoddart et al, 2020).…”

Infantile scurvy as a consequence of agricultural intensification in the 1st millennium BCE Etruria Campana

“…During the 1st millennium BCE in Etruria, signs of such agricultural intensification is attested by archaeological evidence of vegetational changes in pollen assemblages 72 , the emergence of hierarchies of settlement type 71 , different livestock grazing practices 73 , and hydraulic works 74 that would have supported the primary economic and productive activities, i.e., agriculture and livestock breeding 75 . The recovery of iron tools such as plows, hoes, and spades suggest that these populations had the means to prepare hard soils for planting and to irrigate fields.…”

Long-Term Demographic Trends in Prehistoric Italy: Climate Impacts and Regionalised Socio-Ecological Trajectories

“…This process culminated in full-scale urbanisation and early-state societies during the Late Iron Age (c. 2700-2500 cal yr BP) and Archaic period (c.2500-2400 cal yr BP ), when the political landscape was fragmented into several city-states located at an average distance of 15-25 km from each other (Vanzetti, 2002;Riva, 2009, pp. 12-37;Fulminante et al, 2017;Prignano et al, 2019;Stoddart et al, 2020).…”