- chapter 7: Urbanization in Southern Etruria –
environment would be of limited help in the maintenance (or enforcement) of stable foci
of aggregation and social control. In this connection, it is noteworthy that many older
Etruscan cities were abandoned in late Antiquity and that few of the Renaissance cities
in the region emerged on the same sites. Physical geography and resource proximity do
not fully account for the spatial confi guration of city-states in this area.
City formation was probably also fuelled by growing aspirations and ambitions
peculiar to the late eighth and seventh centuries in which consumerism, fashion,
cosmopolitanism and social networking played a part, albeit within the limits of a society
dominated by strict social protocols, client-patron and clan-like relations.^51 At the same
time, high-level treaties and strategic alliances with foreigners or foreign states, of a kind
already mentioned by literary sources for the sixth century, were presumably more easily
negotiated and maintained from within urban structures that were mutually recognizable,
along with unmistakable symbols of status and authority, despite the linguistic or ethnic
diversity of the parties involved.
Apart from forms of competition, symbolic entrainment and emulation, described
under the heading of peer polity interaction,^52 more direct stimuli are conceivable in
an age of increasingly good communications and movement of goods, ideas and people.
Etruscan urban centers were undoubtedly able to expand autonomously and to absorb
outsiders, as suggested by inscriptions or textual evidence. A corollary is their ability to
colonize or found new sites, mostly within their own territories, but sometimes further
afi eld.^53 Population estimates are notoriously diffi cult, but urban centers undoubtedly
grew considerably after the EIA and contained several thousand people by the later sixth
century (though perhaps no more than about 10,000 typically).^54
For the seventh century, the story of Demaratus, a Corinthian merchant-nobleman,
who moves to Tarquinia accompanied by craftsmen and fathers a future king of Rome
by his Etruscan wife, seems as literally emblematic of cross-cultural fertilization as
it is possible to imagine. Rather than a (Greek)-teacher/(Etruscan)-pupil model of
interaction, which is how the story is sometimes read, it may signal a form of peer polity
magnetism, in which the host city (Tarquinia) has already achieved a respectable size
and internationally recognizable form of power and status in the eyes of a distant foreign
metropolis (Corinth). From a diffusionist perspective, however, one might suggest that
Etruscology has tended to underestimate the potential of contacts with Phoenicians who
are under-represented in literary sources but who were the only people in the western
Mediterranean in the eighth century with a long-prior knowledge and experience of life
in urban city-states.
The origins and trajectory of Etruscan urbanization are also bound up with state
formation, which takes us back to the EIA (or the Final Bronze Age), a period sometimes
regarded as one of step-like rather than ramp-like change from an earlier (Middle-Late
Bronze Age) stage. Archaeological work increasingly has revealed connections between
the EIA and subsequent periods. Urbanization tends to be associated with the seventh
and sixth centuries, when we can see a veritable building boom that did much to
determine the layout, appearance and character of major Etruscan cities for centuries
to come. However, if we reason that this must have been preceded locally by social and
political change, then at least the second half of the eighth century seems no less crucial.
While the evidence is rather skewed towards ritual and monumentality, these were
evidently powerful ingredients in Etruscan urbanization. Even the fi rst use of writing,
once regarded as a sine qua non for any respectable urban civilization, seems to be closely