Giving Voice to a preRoman City: the case of Falerii Veteres

Abstract

The study of Etruscan cities had been substantially neglected until the last forty years. Indeed, the absence of thorough studies on the “cities of the living” is widely acknowledged as one of the weaknesses of Etruscan studies. It is, however, important to remember that in the last 15 years information about Etruscan cities has increased significantly. This new wave of research has not been confined to northern Etruria and the Po Valley: the major South-Etruscan cities have been involved too. Notwithstanding this considerably increased data set, an in-depth and satisfactory picture of the ways in which the urban form developed between roughly the second half of the 8th century BC and the Roman conquest can be sketched for none of the Etruscan cities. Although it is self-evident that no conclusive and exact interpretation can presently be made, the abundance of data we can now rely on could help develop updated and comprehensive analyses of at least some Etruscan cities. Such an operation, if carried out following a shared methodological approach, would also guarantee the possibility of adopting in a second phase a broadly speaking “comparative” method among the diverse urban realities. Finally, this kind of approach would give us also the chance to understand whether a “common frame” can be recognised in different Etruscan cities and the deeper reasons for this absence/presence. This second step cannot be pursued without the first, i.e. no “comparative” attempt can be carried out without a clear shared methodological approach. In this respect I think that a “foundation” case study that could provide a kind of “methodological grid” would be useful. Among the possible subjects for study, Falerii Veteres can be considered a good (if not the best currently) possible fit. Research over the last 30 years has reconsidered investigations carried out since the last decades of the 19th century, and dealt both with the urban centre and the suburban areas. With topographical analysis and material culture studies, the city has reached an adequate level of published documentation that can be relatively simply integrated with the still unpublished data. The present research aims therefore, through the Falerii case, at tackling the phenomenon of Etruscan urbanism from an holistic perspective in the period 8th c. BC – 3rd c. BC.

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ORCID for David Wheatley: orcid.org/0000-0002-7265-704X

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