The Urbanisation of Etruria
Funerary Practices and Social Change, 700–600 BC

Riva offers a reading of the socio-political transformations that led to the formation of urban centres in Tyrrhenian Italy.

Corinna Riva (Author)

9780521514477, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 December 2009

260 pages, 59 b/w illus. 3 maps
25.4 x 17.8 x 1.6 cm, 0.67 kg

In this survey of the burial and settlement evidence of late Iron Age Etruria, Corinna Riva offers a new reading of the socio-political transformations that led to the formation of urban centres in Tyrrhenian central Italy. Through a close examination of burial ritual and the material culture associated with it, Riva traces the transformations of seventh-century elite funerary practices and the structuring of political power around these practices in Etruria, arguing that the tomb became the locus for the articulation of new forms of political authority at urban centres. Challenging established views that deem contact with eastern Mediterranean regions crucial to these developments, Riva offers a radically new interpretation of the so-called Orientalizing material culture, taking a long-term perspective on local changes and east-west contact across the Mediterranean.

1. The ancient city and Etruria
2. A long process and rapid change
3. Orientalizing: accessibility and transformation
4. The transformation of funerary ideology
5. The transformation of political authority
6. The transformation of grave-goods
7. Etruria and its urban Mediterranean network.

Subject Areas: Material culture [JFCD], Prehistoric archaeology [HDDA]