- chapter 4: Fleshing out the demography of Etruria –
Romans, who propped up the wealthy (see Harris 1971: 129–44), but a very different
interpretation of the state of Etruscan society is equally plausible, since lower class
agitation against Roman hegemony was even more marked among the clearly democratic
Greeks.
Others base their hierarchical vision of Etruscan society on the lavish tombs and their
elaborate grave goods, claiming that they suggest a society divided between wealthy
chieftains and the poor, but, as Marshall Becker fi rst posited in several original analyses
of both skeletal remains and their archaeological context (Becker 1990; 1993; 2002), and
as others have investigated in a similar fashion, for Pontecagnano (Robb et al. 2001) the
reality is more complex, with a relatively broad and mobile elite and little clear evidence
of radical inequality or long dynasties of princely power or wealth.
Given the evidence of broad prosperity and limited social inequality revealed by
Etruscan skeletal remains, it is likely that Etruscan society was in fact a rather more
egalitarian society than we have traditionally thought, with a signifi cant middle class, in
the sense of a broad middle income group, as in modern North American usage (see Mayer
2012; Kron forthcoming). While we cannot offer estimates of overall wealth inequality to
show, the existence of a middle class as large as in some modern representative democracies
and welfare states (Kron 2011), as at Classical Athens, or even to survey in full, large
housing samples to provide a credible estimate of likely income inequality, as for Pompeii
and Herculaneum (Kron forthcoming), we do have suffi cient evidence to conclude that
Etruscan society fi ts comfortably within a Greco-Roman and Carthaginian koine of
broadly democratic and egalitarian middle class societies. Certainly, the Etruscans were
widely recognized as one of the leading commercial civilizations of the Mediterranean,
famed for their wealth and luxury (Potter 1979: 69–87; Liébert 2006), successful craft
production and manufacturing (Barker and Rasmussen 1998: 201–10; Torelli 2001:
365–476; Camporeale 2001), highly prized metalwork (Barker and Rasmussen 1998:
206–9; Torelli 2001: 393–404) and bucchero pottery, widely exported into Italian and
foreign markets (Barker and Rasumssen 1998: 214–5; Naso and Trojsi 2009).
Although a detailed discussion would be out of place here, it is worth noting that there is
a great deal of corroborating archaeological evidence for the rise of a broad Etruscan middle
class of prosperous traders, craftsmen and small farmers in the Archaic period. We can cite,
for example, the precocious emergence of a broad mass market for craft manufactures, most
notably bucchero ware (Potter 1979: 72), as well as a wide range of Greek and Phoenico-
Carthaginian imports (Spivey 1991; Barker and Rasmussen 1998: 203–5; 214; Giudice
1999; Osborne 2001; Lewis 2003; Fletcher 2007: 100, Figs. 169–71; 121–4; Ambrosini
2009; Baldoni 2009), in the cities of Etruria. Survey archaeology (see Izzet 2007: 200,
Table 6.1 and Potter 1979; Barker and Rasmussen 1988: 29–32; 38–9; Perkins 1999:
55–64; Enei 2001) documents an intensively cultivated landscape with many small farms,
many of which were likely those of small tenant farmers or owner-occupiers, many of
which are pretty substantial (Barker and Rasmussen 1998: 167–72), their numbers rising
in the sixth century bc and fi lling the landscape by the fi fth century bc (Rasmussen 1998;
Izzet 2007: 193–207). A relatively sophisticated system of intensive mixed farming seems
to have been practiced, with crop rotations and the integration of a full range of domestic
livestock, and even a market for wild game (Barker and Rasmussen 1998: 182–200). A
growing urban middle class begins to become clear archaeologically as Villanovan hut
villages are transformed into populous Etruscan cities (Spivey and Stoddart 1990: 61;
Cornell 1995: 204, Table 3; Barker and Rasmussen 1998: 153), with public squares, broad