Notes on the rural landscape of central Tyrrhenian Italy in the 6th-5th c. b.c. and its social significance

Abstract

During the last few decades most landscape archaeologists have noted the diffusion and the demographic importance of the rural landscapes of Archaic Etruscan communities and have tried to define their significance within Etruscan society in the same way as others have attempted to evaluate the political significance of the Greek rural landscape. Recent research on Italian landscapes has led to a great increase in the available data regarding the different paths of development for the various communities, allowing them to be outlined and compared.The growing dichotomy between the studies of field archaeologists and historians or art-historians may appear to be a problem. Landscape studies in Italy have been dominated since the 1950s by an Anglocentric tradition of economic and environmental archaeology, with important work focusing on long-term phenomena. Historians and art-historians, on the other hand, have tried to define an interdisciplinary approach involving the use of several sources of evidence (art-historical, epigraphic, literary) and focusing on historical events and medium-or short-term phenomena. Yet field and historical archaeology are simply two sides of the same coin, and should be viewed as complementary rather than incompatible approaches to understanding the comolex evidence of the Dre-Roman cultures.