Etruscan Archaeology

The Etruscans inhabited italy in the region known as Etruria (modern Tuscany, upper Latium, and parts of Umbria), from around 1000–900 b.c. into the first century b.c. Traditionally, Etruscan archaeology has been a multidisciplinary pursuit. Experts in the field seek to unite evidence on Etruscan language, history, society, religion, myth, art, and architecture with more strictly archaeological data concerning topography, settlement patterns, cemeteries, construction techniques, inscriptions, ceramics, and metalwork. The global approach is epitomized in the writings of Massimo Pallottino (d. 1995), who is universally acknowledged as the greatest of all Etruscan scholars.

Scholarship on the Etruscans began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in connection with the pride and curiosity of Italians who were investigating the origins of their cities. They quickly recognized that many towns had Etruscan beginnings, and in some cases, they gave special emphasis to their own Etruscan ancestry—for example, the Medici of Florence (Cipriani 1980). Much of this research on the Etruscans was philological and art historical, drawing on Greek and Roman writers not only for Etruscan history but for such matters as the design of Etruscan temples, described by Vitruvius in the later first century b.c. (De architectura 4.7) or the nature of Etruscan terracotta sculpture and small bronzes, noted by Pliny the Elder in the first century a.d. (Natural History 33.158; 34.34). Pliny also gave a detailed account of the tomb of Lars Porsenna (Natural History 26.91), king of Etruscan Clusium (Chiusi).

Epigraphical evidence was recorded and evaluated in the Renaissance by Sigismondo Tizio of Siena (d. 1528), who compiled the first known Etruscan vocabulary list, and by Annio of Viterbo (d. 1502), who unfortunately was prone to enhance or even completely fabricate inscriptions in his home territory (Weiss 1988). Much more admirable scholarship is found in the report by the Renaissance artist and writer Giorgio Vasari on the discovery of the famed bronze Chimaera in 1553 in his native Arezzo (now in the Archaeological Museum in Florence). He concluded that the statue was Etruscan on the basis of the letters inscribed on its leg and was able to identify the beast through numismatic comparisons.

Some of the early scholars on the Etruscans were not Italians. The French savant Guillaume Postel, in De Etruria regionis… originibus, institutis, religione, et moribus (1551), lent his support to some of the more preposterous ideas of Annio, such as the notion that the Etruscans could be traced back to Noah. In the seventeenth century, the German archaeologist and antiquarian Athanasius Kircher visited an Etruscan tomb near Viterbo and left an amazing account of how he was told by a local guide that the stone-carved chambers and beds were actually made for underground cave dwellers. This misinterpretation can be forgiven in light of the scarce knowledge of Etruscan topography at the time.

The most important study of the Etruscans in the seventeenth century, by the Scotsman Thomas Dempster (Haynes 2000), was in fact written with little direct knowledge of archaeological sites. Dempster’s famous De Etruria regali libri septem (Seven Books on Etruria of the Kings) is based on information from classical sources about the origins, customs, history, cities, and language of the Etruscans. Written for the Medici Cosimo II (d. 1621), the work was not published until over a century later by the English bibliophile Thomas Coke, who purchased the manuscript in Florence. The work appeared in 1726 (though the date of publication is listed as 1723–1724) and contains notes by the Florentine scholar Filippo Buonarroti (Galli 1986) and ninety-three illustrations. Buonarroti’s archaeological commentary added immensely to the value of Dempster’s work, including, for example, reports on some of his own systematic survey of tombs near Civita Castellana.

The publication of De Etruria regali was both a symptom and a cause of an absolute mania for the Etruscans that developed in the eighteenth century (de Grummond 1986, 39–40). On a fairly superficial level, this mania found its way into decorations of English country houses and provided the name “Etruria” for the neoclassical ceramics factory of Josiah Wedgwood in England. In Italy, a patriotic fervor for this Italian civilization emerged, and the Etruscans were