This is the thirtieth volume of the indispensable conference proceedings of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Etruschi ed Italici, and those who know the series will know what to expect. Monumental, lavishly produced, and heterogeneous, these volumes refuse the tidiness of the contemporary anglophone conference volumes and unapologetically deliver a wealth of data. And all the better for that – these are books which stand for decades of hard archaeological and archival graft whilst encouraging us to do the work of making sense of it all.
The very first thematic congress was on Spina and Etruria Padana, and interest in this area has continued unabated. There are some difficulties to overcome. What is the unitary nature of the region? Much of the work here centres around Bologna, which has become a genuinely intriguing site. But what role did the Po play? In what way is this a riverine landscape? (Venturini is the only scholar to focus on this, picking up from a typically astute comment by Cristofani). And, indeed to what extent is it Etruscan? The Etruscan ‘empire’ is rather misty, somewhat like north Italian autumn mornings over that broad watery sweep. We know it is there but we cannot quite discern its shape. This volume starts to lift the fog a little.
The chronological range of the volume (10th to 5th century BCE) means that we pick up the story after the collapse of Terramare culture. This truly remarkable civilization, which was for centuries brilliantly adapted to a waterlogged environment, collapsed around 1150, leading to apparent depopulation. In the Po Valley a world is reborn at much the same time as the Villanovan settlements south of Florence are taking over their plateau sites, but with a different trajectory.
The first volume focuses on settlement archaeology and evidence for social and political change. Bologna is the subject of the first essays. City formation in the eighth century is later here than further south. The reoccupation of the territory through villages which only slowly come together then makes the moment of synoecism at Bologna particularly interesting. Ortalli’s remarkable find of a huge wooden platform at Piazza VIII Agosto and other indications of urban planning are suggestive of a major effort to transform the political landscape. Has Ortalli found Bologna’s Campo Marzio? That may be harder to demonstrate, but the development of an economically and politically significant centre seems clear and that will have attracted attention from the Etruscans further south.
The economics of the Po valley show interesting signs of specialization and a good example is Verucchio, which appears to have been a textile centre through to the seventh century, when it gives way to Rimini (Ariminum). Seeing Verucchio, as Naso does, in the context of the Valmarecchia helps us to focus on the productive elements of the Romagna area and its connections across the Apennines, with Vetulonia for example. These intersecting valley systems are starting to come into better focus (compare the Tuscania and Potenza surveys).
So geography and economics are doing their work; what about the social evolution of the region?
Institutional history is largely hidden; Maggiani works hard to make sense of the zilaθ in the cippi from Rubiera as part of broader monarchical phenomena in Italy, and Govi, whose painstaking excavation at Marzabotto is sufficiently exciting and important to gain entry here even though the site is on the absolute limit of the territory, makes a good case for fertility being key to the Uni cult there.
This is familiar material: ecological niches, sacralized through ritual and leading to social differentiation which transforms institutionally over time as settlements change and densify. The essays that follow on point to the more individualistic refinements at Spina, Adria and Mantua. The interactions with diverse population groups, especially Greeks but then Celts, and the distinctive nature of the settlements in relation to their landscape, created more of a sense of individuality. Spina’s unique relationship to water and its epigraphic evidence on cobblestones of internal boundaries (replicated elsewhere), the presence of remarkable testimony of carpentry as a high craft in Adria, and the significance of ritual continuity, possibly connected to augury in Mantua are good examples. Essays on artistic schools and epigraphy, with Benelli neatly showing the huge onomastic similarity between family names in Adria and Spina and in southern Etruria, offer a helpful tour d’horizon.
As often the posters are fascinating, too; the little 6th-/5th- century site of Bagnolo San Vito in the territory of Mantua, an orthogonally planned 12 ha site seemingly planned to take advantage of waterborne trade, is especially intriguing. Taken together then we have a rich and complex range of sites – but we have to wait to part three to see the northwestern Po. It is not easy to establish what mechanisms connect southern Etruria with Bologna and the northeastern reaches.
The first part of the second volume gathers papers on funerary and ritual evidence. Bologna again looms large with a painstaking reconstruction of the archive of the orientalizing tombs of the Arsenale Militare and the new excavation at Piazza Azzarita (8th to 5th centuries BCE). This latter reveals one of the ongoing problems (to my mind) of burial archaeology. Locatelli examines the evidence to show emergence of gentilicial groups larger than the family (an absolutely standard move in Italian scholarship); Buoite and Campagnari investigate the same material to establish complex mixed funerary assemblages (métissage as they characterise it). Whilst kinship of one sort or another is a likely organising principle in necropoleis, it is not the only one and a more questioning approach reveals more interesting directions of travel. The essays also pick out the specific uses of the krater in Bologna and Marzabotto, identifying a degree of conservatism in imports, shifting treatments of gendered material and of the very young over time, and a couple of isolated groups, one in Spina (perhaps from a smaller port site, 4th to 3rd centuries BCE) and a rather rich group from Adria (6th to 4th centuries BCE).
The third part of the proceedings looks at Etruria padana in connection with neighbouring peoples and will be of especial interest to historians as well as those interested in cultural interaction in the mid first millennium BCE. The very useful overview by Malnati and others might have come earlier for context. It does however depict a rather different world – there is a certainty over the political role of Bologna, its position as a founder, that has not been so evident in essays which focus on individual particularities. More of the outside world impinges—Umbrians, Veneti, the Golaseccan cultural group and Celts for instance. It is somewhat jarring to arrive at such certainty so suddenly, a reminder that seeing this area from the outside in may result in a different account. However it is also the case that Malnati is sometimes interpreting the same archaeological evidence to give historical facts and there are therefore some methodological issues to disentangle.
Marinetti’s account of linguistic and epigraphic connections between Veneti and Etruscans will merit attention, though it is necessarily based on a limited corpus. At the very least she shows us significant mobility across the region, underscored by Gambacurta’s essay on the successful economic activity in the Veneto in the 8th and 7th centuries, followed by a 6th- century reorganisation, and also by Macellari’s intriguing essay on individual attestations of cultural exchange at Brescello and Poviglio. What falls off Gambacurta’s map, perhaps because of the focus on Golaseccan culture discussed by Casini and De Marinis, is the eastern side of the Adriatic (we will come back to that). There are excellent summaries of recent work on the Rhaeti (thought Etruscan by the ancients, but perhaps their own distinct grouping), Friuli and the plain of Modena. Individual fascinating sites, San Martino in Gattara (Ravenna), Ferro di Gatteo (Forlì-Cesena) and Numana, open up new conversations about exchange generally and in the latter case in the Adriatic.
So the arc of the volumes runs from inwardly turned accounts of individual sites to a more outwardly facing set of essays on exchange, with a pivot in funerary evidence which is often a key indicator of exchange. Apart from the individual smaller sites, this conference offers an essential update for Bologna and Adria. In his conclusion Sassatelli (who, it must be noted, has worked extraordinarily brilliantly both in this region as an archaeologist and also as President on behalf of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Etruschi ed italici which organises these conferences) recognises how much disruptive change emerges around the turn of the 6th to 5th centuries BCE, a not uncommon story in Italy.
I do want to return though to two watery absences. First, the river and port complex of the Po Valley still remains hard to make out. Now in a phase of desperate decline and ecological crisis, this is a complex land and waterscape that required its own agricultural and trading regimes, and ones far different from south Etruria. Second, the Adriatic is nearly absent, and yet it must have been critical to the Greek presence. It is nearly 90 years since R. L. Beaumont published his superb essay on ‘Greek Influence in the Adriatic Sea before the Fourth Century BC.’[1] This volume tells us so much about a rich, diverse, fascinating, commercially and agriculturally significant part of the ancient world prior to the Roman conquest, but it leaves us with questions, as it should. Perhaps its most important impact would be a conference that helped us better understand the fluctuating fortunes of the sea into which the Po discharges through its great delta beside Venice.
Notes
[1] Journal of Hellenic Studies 56(2) (1936):159-204.