CHAPTER FOUR

FLESHING OUT THE

DEMOGRAPHY OF ETRURIA

Geof Kron

T

he analysis of skeletal remains offers extremely important evidence for health, nutrition
and changes in economic development and social equality, particularly for poorly
documented civilizations, such as that of the Etruscans. Interpreting Etruscan physical
anthropology is diffi cult, and we can only give a brief and tentative preliminary sketch
at this stage of research, given the limited number of comprehensive anthropometric
studies using the best methods; nevertheless, enough evidence exists to suggest that
the Etruscans enjoyed an overall level of health and nutrition notably superior to that of
the working classes of nineteenth-century Europe. This is true for most Greco-Roman
populations from the late Archaic and Classical periods through the Roman republic and
empire (Kron 2005), but the Etruscan diet, like that of many Classical and Hellenistic
Greeks (Kron 2005: 72), seems, for the most part, to have been perceptibly better than
that of the population of later Roman Italy.
Classical archaeologists have traditionally concentrated relatively little upon the
techniques of the “New Archaeology,” most importantly for our purposes, the exploitation
of zooarchaeology, archaeobotany and physical anthropology when excavating in Italy (see
MacKinnon 2007 for an overview). Etruscan archaeology, however, was a relatively early
and signifi cant exception to this general rule. The controversy, which dates from Classical
times and the competing accounts of Herodotus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, over
the extent of Eastern Aegean or Near Eastern infl uence on the origins of Etruscan culture
inspired Italian physical anthropologists, dating back at least as far as the 1880s (Coppa
et al. 1997: 99 note 2; see Chapters 2 and 3 in this book), with an intense interest in
determining the relationship between the “ethnicity” or “race” of this enigmatic people,
and that of the other cultural groups in Iron Age, Roman, and modern Italy (see Ward-
Perkins 1959, Perkins 2009 for two eminently sensible accounts). This obsession on
the part of physical anthropologists with identifying ethnic groups, which owed much
to the infl uence upon early anthropometric research of eugenics and social Darwinism,
continues to channel much research away from the estimation of stature using long-bone
measurement, for example, which would clarify the diet and living standards of these
populations, towards studies designed to elucidate ethnic relationships, particularly