Power and Place in Etruria: Volume 1

This book reconstructs political history from the spatial organization of ancient society, challenging the approach favored by classicists.

This book will interest prehistorians, anthropological archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, classicists and historians. Readers will discover an unexpected example of political history read from the spatial dynamics of settlement history. It will provide rich understanding of politics read from landscape without resorting to text or image.This volume fills a gap in the study of an important, yet neglected case of state formation, by taking a landscape perspective to Etruria. Simon Stoddart examines the infrastructure, hierarchy/heterarchy and spatial patterns of the Etruscans over time to investigate their political development from a new perspective. The analysis both crosses the divide from prehistory to history and applies a scaled analysis to the whole region between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Arno and Tiber rivers, with special focus on the neglected region between Populonia on the coast and Perugia and the north Umbrian region adjoining the Apennines. Stoddart uncovers the powerful places that were in dynamic tension not only between themselves, but also with the internal structure constituted by the descent groups that peopled them. He unravels the dynamically changing landscape of changing boundaries and buffer zones which contained robust urbanism, as well as less centralized, polyfocal nucleations.