- Gilda Bartoloni –
almost always consists of a bowl or dish with a conical body, incurving rim and ring
handles set between two small pseudo-lugs. Already in the earliest phase, some ossuaries
are closed not with bowls/plates but with conical helmets in clay (at Tarquinia, Veii, etc.)
and later, with crested helmets reproducing bronze specimens.
Particularly prominent among the ossuaries are the previously noted model huts (Fig.
5.5); hut urns are attested mainly in coastal Etruria (at Vetulonia, Vulci, Tarquinia,
Caere) and southern interior Etruria (Bisenzio and the territory of Veii): the percentage
of these urns in the shape of houses is very low in contrast to the conventional biconical
jars, amounting to one hut urn for every hundred biconical urns, thus indicative of their
special character. In centers where there are models of housing functioning as ossuaries,
the helmet-cover of biconical urns may have represented the gabled roof of the hut.
In the biconical vase, the ideology of the armed warrior, expressed by the helmet, is
augmented by that of the protector of the home: the two functions, of owner of the house
and protector of the family inside, expressed through the symbols of the hut and the
warrior, are associated with, and attributed to, a single personage.
In the earliest period of Villanovan culture, grave goods do not seem to reveal any
difference in wealth or social status: they differ only in distinguishing women from
men, and among these only a few are known as warriors, through the helmet or, rarely,
weapons. Distinctive features such as hut urns are not solely the prerogatives of male or
female: to a woman must be attributed a set of offerings (from Vulci?) in which are two
miniature impasto spindles and a spindle whorl (see G. Bartoloni, La cultura villanoviana.
All’inizio della storia etruca, Rome 2002: 188, Fig. 6.19). There is no difference in grave
goods between depositions with hut urns and those in biconical urns.
Consequently, the documentation of the cemeteries seems to point to an entirely
egalitarian system. Instead, it is more likely that, because of a constant funerary ideology,
community members were considered equal in the rite of burial: one speaks of a
combination of a common belief combined with the rigidity of cremation ritual.
About two or three generations after the advent of the so-called Villanovan revolution,
funerary offerings, previously quite sober, are enriched with additional elements, signs
Figure 5.6 Grave group from Tarquinia (after M. Torelli, A. M. Sgubini Moretti, Etruschi. Le antiche
metropoli del Lazio, Rome, 2008, photo Soprintendenza archeologica per la Toscana).