External relationship (Early Iron Age), chapter 44

This chapter focuses on the main phenomena of long-distance exchange relationships in Early Iron Age Etruria. The emergence of new demographic hubs and centers of power resulted in the general growth in the circulation of raw materials and artifacts. This was accompanied by the selective transmission of foreign models of material culture, styles, technologies and knowledge. They can be differentiated according to diachronic development, direction of influences and vectors. In the initial stages of the Iron Age the connections were mainly oriented towards central and northern Europe on the one hand, and the great Tyrrhenian island of Sardinia on the other. Most relationships were centered on the metal trade, but possibly a considerable role may have been played by other raw materials, such as amber. Connections with continental Europe were associated with the wide diffusion of bronze artifact typologies, such as antenna swords, elements of armor and ceremonial vessels, presumably transmitted by foreign smiths in the service of local elites. Relations with the Nuragic civilization, monopolized by maritime north-central Etruria, were of a different nature, involving imports of small bronze objects and a specific kind of ritual pottery vessel, the askoid jug, which was also locally imitated by Sardinian immigrants. In the late ninth and eighth centuries, in association with the reactivation of Mediterranean colonial movements and trade, central Tyrrhenian Italy started a new cycle of contacts, mainly with people of the Near East (Levantine, Phoenician) and Greeks. Oriental goods, especially luxury items, such as ornaments and bronze cups, but also painted ceramics of Greek manufacture, were increasingly traded. Acceleration of relationships occurred around the mid eighth century, when the foundation of trading posts and colonies by Euboeans and Phoenicians (such as Pithekoussai and Sulcis) fostered the immigration of oriental craftsmen and the transmission of exotic material culture patterns, linked to the areas of commensal practices and power imagery.