CHAPTER ONE

ETRUSCAN ENVIRONMENTS

Ingela M. B. Wiman

THE TERRA FIRMA

T

he continents are in a state of fl ux, in a manner usually invisible to the naked eye
but horribly obvious when the earth quakes or the tsunami swells. The Etruscan
landscape was shaped by such disastrous events thousands of years ago. Today the African
plate is still pushing over the Eurasian one in a north-easterly direction slowly pressing
down the western land, resulting in a rise in sea level on the coastal plains of Italy since
the time the Etruscans ruled.
Etruria proper was situated below the western Apennines and between the rivers: the
Arno to the north and the Tiber to the south and east. Large parts of Latium were once
controlled by the Etruscans as was the city of Rome in the sixth century bc. Etruscan-
speaking people moved north-east and traversed the Po valley. Eventually they also
founded trading cities on the Adriatic coast, Spina and Adria. The Tyrrhenian Sea now
hides some of their ancient territory. Great rivers, however, especially the Arno, Ombrone
and Tiber transgressed the lands in westerly, winding courses transporting silt and mud
along their way, the so-called alluvium that created swamps and silted coastlines on the
Tyrrhenian Sea. This is especially evident around the mouth of the Arno at Pisa. The large
river system joining it there has considerably broadened the coastline from Livorno to
Viareggio. Pisa was closer to the sea in ancient times,^1 unlike the San Cerbone cemetery
and port of Populonia that in Antiquity reached a further 80 meters out from today’s
seashore. The port of Caere, Pyrgi, has seen its ancient shorelines hidden by the sea,
whereas Rome had to deal with silted coasts at Ostia and Portus.
Rivers that cut through the porous volcanic tuffs, the Bruno, Mignone, Fiore, Marta
and Vesca caused the deep gorges and plateaus that are so typical of the south Etruscan
landscape, the beauty of which is often beyond words. The Apennines, the core of which
is limestone that was once the bottom of the ocean, are continuously rising and folding
due to the continental clash pressure, as are the smaller hills west of their high peaks,
the sub-Apennines. As humans started to burn down the forests on the hills to make
the land arable,^2 snow and rains from the mountains and hills have carried soils down
their slopes to the valleys below forming the typical Mediterranean landscape of barren
or macchia highlands covered in scrubland vegetation, and cultivated valley bottoms with
olives or vines on the sloping hills. The precise time these occurrences started to reform