The present study focuses on the rural settlement data from Etruria, Central Italy during the key centuries, from the 7th and the 5th centuries BC, when urbanised institutions (and lifestyles) consolidated.

Despite responding to similar stimuli, Etruscan centres adopted different strategies to control their lands and benefit from them. Urbanisation was however also met with resistance. These approaches led to a variety of ways of acting, reacting to and experiencing urbanisation, and have been abundantly studied through material culture recovered, for the most part, from cemeteries.

My research will identify these differences from a quantitative point of view, analysing survey data obtained throughout the second half of the 20th century. The study of these rural sites will help define the rural infrastructure that sustained the genesis of Etruscan central places between the 7th and the 5th centuries BC.

Four case studies were selected, representing different types of territorial control: the palatial site of Poggio Civitate, in open conflict with urbanised realities; Chiusi and Cerveteri, both urban central places but with different developments and ways to administer their territories; finally, Tuscania, a mid-ranking, regional central place tied to the city of Tarquinia.

Through these case studies, I will answer three questions:

1. What can rural settlements tell us about the workings of the Etruscans?
2. Were different approaches adopted by different Etruscan cities?
3. How did elites contribute to or resist the development of urban polities?

My research will enhance more recent studies focused on territoriality, which also employed rural data (Stoddart et al., 2020; Stoddart, 2020a). I will achieve this by reviewing the sites gathered from several survey projects, to analyse population changes. A GIS-based locational analysis, as well as a Land Evaluation Analysis, will be then carried out to assess environmental matters.

The general framework for urbanisation will be provided by Central Place Theory (CTP) and Early State Module (ESM), with particular regard to their application to Etruria by Redhouse & Stoddart, 2014; Stoddart et al., 2020; Stoddart, 2020a. Through computational techniques, these works uncovered the dynamism of Etruscan landscapes by applying a related model, XTENT, able to indicate border formation and give useful insights on the development of Etruscan polities.

These models, tied to the evolutionary anthropology and processual archaeology traditions, will be then completed with relatively new social anthropological studies on state formation and urbanisation, which have been only recently applied to Central Italian urbanisation. Contrasting roles of Etruscan elites in urban developments and in the administration of territories will be highlighted and discussed in light of the “House society” and “basal units” models, and Kopytoff’s “internal frontier” model.

This approach will provide a more nuanced examination of how structured Etruscan landscapes became, how they were exploited, who lived there, and how relationships with the central place were developed, as well as the different decisions and responses of the central places’ leading families to such changes that transformed Etruria into an influential and competing player in the Mediterranean scene.