Recent surveys of the landscape have given a better measure of where individuals and families lived. Etruscan society went through phases of profound centralization and decentralization where more or less people lived directly in the urban area of a city. In spite of these fluctuations, most individuals would have considered themselves also part of a city’s identity even if they were resident in a rural farmstead. There is sufficient linguistic evidence to suggest that the Etruscans had a concept of both state (methlum) and city (spur-).
The earliest signs of corporate (that is, community) identity come from the new excavations at Tarquinia where a sequence of animal sacrifices, votive deposits, intrasettlement burials, and significant items of authority (axe, shield, and trumpet) show that a sacred place developed an increasingly formal significance over time (late tenth century BC to sixth century BC). Cities as well as descent groups had founders. Tarchon was the legendary founder of Tarquinia, and the status of these figures was often ritualized. A fourth-century bronze mirror from Tuscania, a city subject to Tarquinia, shows an elderly man, avl tarc-hunus, supervising a younger boy, pava tarchies, in the interpretation of a liver.
A different scale of community identity is represented by the discoveries at Murlo (Piano del Tesoro, Poggio Civitate). Here, elaborate ritual was embedded in the activities of an elite residence. In the first phase (seventh century), buildings were constructed along two sides of a court, decorated with terracottas of elite horsemen and exotic felines, associated with artisan production (wool, bone, horn, ivory, and glass). In the second, better-preserved, sixth-century phase, the building took monumental shape around a courtyard, with watchtowers at the corners. The roofs were decorated with 23 or more prominent terracotta male and female figures on the ridgepoles. One male figure wore an oblong beard and a characteristic pointed and broad-brimmed hat, giving a very distinctive identity to his role as one of many deliberately ambiguous representations of combined roles of rulers, heroes, and divinities.
A series of terracotta friezes decorated the interior of the courtyard, some showing a horse race and processions of elite individuals in two-wheeled carts, accompanied by servants on foot carrying symbols of authority and feasting (choppers, spits, stools, parasols, fans, food containers, and containers for liquid). Other friezes show reclining, feasting male and female figures and figures seated on distinctive stools and thrones with footstools, accompanied by further symbols of status and authority (lyres, double-headed axes, branches, fans, curved sticks, sword and spear, etc.). Faunal remains from Murlo and the presence of dogs suggest that hunting was one of the pursuits defining the identity of the high-status members of the community.
A mid-sixth-century residential complex in the middle of the city of Acquarossa has similar qualities to that of Murlo. The two preserved sides of a court contained ritual food deposits and were decorated with terracotta reliefs of banquet scenes (including flautists and lyre players), processions of musicians and acrobats, and lines of foot soldiers, twowheeled chariots, winged horses, and felines.
Walls, a very visible material symbol of urban identity, are first recorded archaeologically in the second half of the seventh century at Roselle, where the first walls were constructed of mudbrick. Roselle, Vetulonia, Populonia, and Volterra all had stone walls constructed in the course of the sixth century BC. A new drive toward community identity took place when a sixth-century temple was replaced in the early part of the fourth century by the Ara della Regina at Tarquinia at a time when the walls were reconstructed and the road layout regularized. Impressive gates, sometimes surmounted by deities of the town, as at Volterra and Perugia, were placed in these walls.
These walls enclosed settlements that dominated the local landscape. In South Etruria particularly, the major cities were in excess of 100 hectares in size whereas the next rank of settlement was only occasionally in excess of 30 hectares. This gave a distinct focus to the identity of community and the walls themselves were surrounded by cemeteries of the dead, particularly on the major approaches into the city. Cities of the dead were thus closely associated with the cities of the living. The city identity was also defined, at least by the sixth century BC, by sanctuaries placed at the political limits of its territory. Some sanctuaries like Punta della Vipera were placed on the boundaries of two Etruscan cities, Tarquinia and Caere. Other sanctuaries combined their role with ports of trade and were placed on the coast, as most effectively demonstrated by the cases of Pyrgi and Gravisca. Pyrgi was connected by a formal road, lined by funerary monuments, to its mother city, Caere, making a firm connection between the identities of the two settlements. The sanctuaries also show as a general trend a move from the implementation of the power of personal identities toward a much more communal identity of the city-state, expressed through the sanctuary itself. These features were less marked in north Etruria, where identity was most probably less starkly focused on the preeminent city. In north Etruria, settlements and accompanying symbols of material culture such as inscriptions and exotic imports were more dispersed into the political territory, suggesting a very different organization of society and the associated identity of the community.
Each city also expressed its identity through distinctive variations in artisan production of different types of material culture. In some cases, prominent cities were innovators whose ideas were then taken up by other cities. In other cases, particularly those related to ritual (e. g., burial), identities expressed through material culture were retained as a statement of difference by individual cities. It is, of course, our knowledge of a mainly funerary material culture that is best known and preserved. For instance, Caere appears to have been responsible for the production of early bucchero, the distinctive shiny black metallic finish pottery of the Etruscans, but the practice soon spread to other settlements (Veii, Tarquinia, Vulci, Vetulonia, and later Orvieto and Chiusi). Orvieto was well known for the production of bronze utensils for banquets and wine drinking. Vulci was a settlement of distinctive ceramic production, such as the black figure of the so-called Micali painter, whose works appear intact and thus recognizable in funerary contexts. Vetulonia and Vulci were well known for metallurgical production. The stone-winged sphinxes of Vulci, again associated with tombs, were another particularly distinctive form of material culture.
The distinct identities are most marked in different tomb construction traditions. Caere has a strong tradition of tomb architecture carved from the local volcanic tuff, which was promoted by descent groups colonizing the outer reaches (such as Pian della Conserva) of the political territory of the city in recognizable but slightly simpler forms. Tarquinia, another southern city, is renowned for its painted tombs, although only about 200 out of 6,000 tombs in the Monterozzi necropolis were built by families prosperous enough to include painting. Thus, the materialization of this distinctive identity of the city was restricted to a small group of elite, hidden from the sight of most members of the community. Chiusi is remarkable for a very distinctive burial tradition of the so-called canopic urn in the seventh century BC. This urn, which contained the ashes of the deceased, carried a lid that was transformed into a personal image of the dead person. By the fifth century BC, this had been transformed into a tradition of enthroned women and men/women reclining on couches. From the sixth century BC, Chiusi was also distinctive for refined sculptures on fine-grained limestone. A number of other northern Etruscan settlements have distinguishing types of funerary stele. The sixth-century BC funerary stele of Avile Tite from Volterra carries a full-length profile on a rectangular slab with a rounded top. Stele from the Fiesole area form a distinct regional cluster of 41 figurative reliefs in limestone. Fifth-century stele from Bologna north of the Apennines on the Po Valley have a distinctive, predominantly horseshoe shape with a range of figurative themes. Another easily recognizable funerary production is that of tuff and alabaster urns from Volterra dating from the fourth to first centuries BC.
Coins, politically redolent symbols of the city, were first produced in the late sixth century and early fifth century BC, most probably in Populonia or possibly Vulci. These follow a Greek system of weights, but are traceable to individual cities by their iconography and inherent symbolism of the community that produced them. Coins were an emphatic way of demonstrating the authority of the city, and although not used as common currency in a modern sense, gave support to city-based measures of wealth and value.
World History
