Patterns of Etruscan Urbanism

Laura Motta,Troy Samuels,Graeme Barker,Giorgia di Paola,Robert Witcher,Simon Stoddart,Alessio Palmisano,David Redhouse,Tom Rasmussen

doi:10.3389/fdigh.2020.00001

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.

Highlights

IntroductionThese were the communities that competed with the Latins to the south of the Tiber, and were later absorbed into the Roman empire (Figure 1A)
BackgroundThe Etruscan settlement pattern analyzed here belonged to rich communities living in an area generally defined as Tyrrhenian central Italy during the first millennium BC
As outlined in the 2011 paper (Redhouse and Stoddart, 2011), the XTENT model was devised by Renfrew and Level (1979) to overcome a number of simplifications faced by the Thiessen (1911) polygon or Voronoi polygon analysis used in the original Early State Module (ESM) analysis of Renfrew (1975)

Summary

Introduction

These were the communities that competed with the Latins to the south of the Tiber, and were later absorbed into the Roman empire (Figure 1A). The benefit of communication was enhanced by access to at least four significant rivers penetrating into the intermontane valleys of the foothills of the Apennines: the Tiber, the Arno, the Ombrone, and the Albegna These rivers assisted the extraction of resources from the mountainous uplands of the Apennines, providing a complementarity between the fertile volcanic agricultural soils and metal resources of the relative lowlands and the pastoral zones of the uplands. Geopolitics underlay the landscape configuration of the Etruscans and this paper explores and extends that logic

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion