In this survey of the burial and settlement evidence of late Iron Age Etruria, Corinna Riva offers a new reading of the socio-political transformations that led to the formation of urban centres in Tyrrhenian central Italy. Through a close examination of burial ritual and the material culture associated with it, Riva traces the transformations of seventh-century elite funerary practices and the structuring of political power around these practices in Etruria, arguing that the tomb became the locus for the articulation of new forms of political authority at urban centres. Challenging established views that deem contact with eastern Mediterranean regions crucial to these developments, Riva offers a radically new interpretation of the so-called Orientalizing material culture, taking a long-term perspective on local changes and east-west contact across the Mediterranean.

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This paper attempts to bridge the gulf between two often separate research agendas in Archaic period Etruria, one concerned with the archaeology of wine and agricultural production and redistribution, the other with figured representations of drinking and the associated symbolic visual language. It does so by examining the relationship between changing processes of production, consumption and exchange and the symbolism of drinking in the visual and material culture of sixth-century BC Tyrrhenian Etruria. In this analysis, I maintain that changing modes of agricultural production and distribution had an impact on such symbolism in elite funerary and domestic contexts, with key evidence also coming from sanctuaries. In particular, it is argued that during the seventh century BC, the visual language related to wine drinking alludes to experiences of bodily otherness; this is indicated by the symbolic correlation between accessibility to wine, the dangers of maritime travel and death. From the sixth century BC, we can trace a shift towards a visual language that centred on cultural difference or otherness: this is noticeable in the introduction of Dionysiac imagery and new mythological narratives of cross-cultural encounters, as well as a new emphasis on codified drinking and culturally differentiated drinking vessels. This shift is more or less contemporary with other changes, namely the production and distribution of 2 agricultural surplus in the Tyrrhenian region and beyond, and shifting values of objects in that exchange.

Recently, voices have been raised regarding the challenges of Big Data-driven global approaches, including the realization that exclusively tackling the global scale masks social and historical realities. While multi-scalar analyses have confronted this problem, the effects of global approaches are being felt. We highlight one of these effects: as classical scholarship struggles to decolonize itself, the ancient Mediterranean in global archaeology pivots around the Graeco-Roman world only, marginalizing the non-classical Mediterranean, thus foiling attempts at promoting post-colonial perspectives. In highlighting this, our aim is twofold: first, to invigorate the debate on multi-scalar approaches, proposing to incorporate microhistory into archaeological analysis; second, to use the non-classical Mediterranean to demonstrate that historical depth at a micro level is essential to augment that power in our interpretations.

Changes in architectural terracotta decoration of temple buildings in Archaic southern Etruria indicate changing attitudes towards the encounter with divinity, which, in turn, shaped religious experience for worshippers, as well as offering an opportunity for the exploitation of that experience to political ends. This paper explores this entanglement by taking the citystate of Caere and its temple decoration as a case study and particularly the cult and iconography of Greek hero Herakles and related myths into account in order to examine the intersection between ritualization and political power in a phase of urban growth across Tyrrhenian Central Italy. Focus, explanatory hypotheses, applied concepts and methodsThis paper wishes to investigate how the religious environment, which includes worshippers' activities as well as the elaborate decoration of religious spaces, shaped, and was in turn shaped by, political power in the city-states of Archaic Southern Etruria, circa sixth to early fifth centuries BC, and hence, to explore the relationship between this power and ritualization (Gordon 1979: 17) in urban settings. It will do so by exploiting theoretically-informed art-historical studies of coeval architectural decoration of Greek temples, which have underlined a system of communication in the decorative programmes of these temples, in which different levels of religious and cultural significance or, one might say, semantic densities pertained to different artistic genres of the decoration, from sculptures in the round to wall paintings and metopes (Hölscher 2009). These studies have furthermore introduced a key conceptual category for understanding such programmes, namely the concept of ornament inherent in the Greek and Latin words kosmos and ornamentum respectively, which, although different in their original meanings (Saliou 2015: 134), both refer to the moral and social order underlying the aesthetic order and hence physical ornament of cult buildings (Marconi 2004; Hölscher 2009; cf. Tanner 2006 on the relationship between the social and the aesthetic in relation to cult statues). Moral and social values thus drove the decorative choices of Greek temples; at the same time, these values were expressed in a religious space where theological demands equally affected these choices (Osborne 2009; cf. Osborne et al. 2016).In contrast to Greece, Archaic Etruria suffers from a lower level of preservation of temple decoration, which often survives in highly fragmented assemblages, as exemplified by much of architectural terracotta decoration at the city of Caere found in cisterns as dumps of building material (Winter 2016: 129). We also lack texts that give us an entry into the Etruscan mentality, and Etruscan social and moral values although analysis across different types of archaeological contexts can partly fill this lacuna (e.g. Riva 2017). Yet, borrowing these conceptual categories and analytical frameworks can greatly assist us. It is not, however, a simple matter of borrowing.Rather, my aim is comparati...