occupied the countryside beginning in the Late Archaic Period. This arrangement, wherein
an urban community oversaw the rural territory in its immediate vicinity, was largely
retained after the Roman conquest of Etruria. Under the Romans, these units were no longer
independent city-states, but rather were self-governing parts of the administrative structure of
the Roman Empire. Cities still governed the activities taking place in their hinterland, but the
major difference was that they were now restricted from formulating any independent foreign
policy. Instead, these territorial units were politically beholden to Rome as a consequence of
individual bilateral treaties of alliance. In some cases, the Romans confiscated major
sections of territory formerly associated with the major Etruscan city-states and incorporated
them into the territory of new Roman colonial foundations. In other cases, the Romans
negotiated a limited autonomy with residents of previously dependent secondary centers. In
these negotiations, some secondary centers acquired a substantial rural hinterland of their
own.
3Bruni 1999, 248. The Etruscan terminology clearly divides the landscape into three portions centered on city,
countryside, and subsidiary center all seen as a territorial unit. Not every city-state shared this identical organization. Veii appears to have systematically repressed the development of subsidiary centers within its territory preferring to govern a dispersed pattern of landholding from the moment of the polity’s inception.
Past Attempts at Classification
In order to understand the development of this landscape and the ways in which it transformed over time in detail, we must first define the types of sites that qualified in each of the categories elicited in the descriptions above: urban center, secondary center, and farmstead. This process is complicated by the addition of a diachronic dimension in which we will consider the development of the landscape across the Pre-Roman and Roman divide in Etruria. In nearly every area of Etruria this transition was accompanied, or preceded by, the creation of new functional categories of site types. Thus, any site definition parameters that we develop must be rooted in a chronological frame.
Past attempts to delineate the nature of the settlement system of Roman and indigenous landscapes can be classified in three major categories: functional, morphological, and legal. Any consideration of the landscape must then address these three types of typology, and the efficacy of each. The problem lies in the often-overlapping nature of such categories, and the fluidity with which the defining characteristics of a site could change over time. The situation is further complicated by the fact that although the legal classification of a site type can be ascertained by a straightforward consideration of the literary evidence, sites that received similar Roman legal designations often did not share the same morphological and functional characteristics. With the latter types of site definitions, those based on morphological or functional characteristics, the classification of sites is more objective, based on sets of common criteria related to the internal features of sites or their location within the larger landscape.4 Yet even these supposedly objective
methods of categorization fall victim to the very nature of the archaeological record.
4With these types of categorizations we lose valuable information on the ways that Romans and Etruscans saw
Etruscan and Roman sites rarely reflect any text-defined set of criteria because of a variety of external factors and post-depositional processes. The real landscape is not populated by sites readily broken into categories, but instead is comprised of a wide spectrum of possibilities in terms of constituent elements.5 At best, it is possible to lay out some of the
salient features of each of the different types of sites and to recognize that any number of sites will contain some of the characteristics contained in multiple categories.
In addition to being part of a spectrum of functional types, sites within the Etruscan landscape are part of a continuum that ranges from the smallest temporary shack to the largest city. The problem of defining sites based on their size is particularly difficult at the bottom range of the settlement scale where archaeologists are forced to differentiate between small, medium, and large-scale isolated farmsteads. Often these are given names such as farms, fattorie, and villas respectively (or their Latin equivalents). The middle category is particularly troublesome with the fattoria type only recently becoming part of the standard definitions employed by regional surveys.6 As a result, debates about the density
and chronology of villas within the landscape have, at times, been the result of terminological differences rather than substantive issues. The issue is just as pernicious at the higher end of the settlement hierarchy, with the definition between cities and minor centers notably fuzzy. The ebb and flow of population in and out of sites, and the promotion and destruction of sites as a consequence of the larger political narrative of various regions compounds these problems.7 Many sites resist definitive assignment into
5Fontaine (1997) and Giovannini (1985) in the two best previous analyses of Etruscan secondary settlements,
failed to provide any type of internal division among the very different sorts of sites that occupied the landscape. Zifferero (1995, 338-340) follows the same type of organization.
ready-made categories because their characteristics changed substantially over time as they grew or negotiated a new status at the time of conquest.
A multiplicity of site types occupied the middle level of the settlement hierarchy, many of which were similar in size and in their internal features. Nevertheless, these sites played very different roles within the larger territory to which they pertain. If we were to categorize sites solely based on their size, sites serving as port communities for larger cities would be grouped alongside local agricultural hubs and heavily fortified military outposts of the castellum type. Because of these considerations, it is necessary to explore first, the Roman and Etruscan terminological definitions of various settlement types in order to gain a picture of the juridical divisions of the landscape. With that task completed, we can move on to consider sites in terms of their functional and morphological characteristics. The following discussion will attempt to employ this process, and to produce a workable division of the landscape into meaningful categories. No matter how clearly such categories are defined, they will be useless if it is not possible to operationalize the definitions in ways that allow archaeologists to recognize such sites from remains on or below the ground. The final section of this chapter will attempt to provide this type of operationalized definition.
Ancient Conceptions of Civic Status
The Romans developed a series of legal categories for recognizing independent primary centers within the landscape. These categories included the designations of municipium, colonia, and praefectura. The term municipium could be attached to any community that was not beholden to another urban center in terms of taxes or
7A number of sites along the route of the Roman Via Clodia show this problem. Sites such as Tuscania and
Norchia were clearly dependent centers under the influence of Tarquinia or Vulci, but became major independent hubs of population under the Roman Empire. These sites will be discussed in detail in a later chapter. Colonization also presents a problem for the categorization of a number of sites. Saturnia for example was clearly an Etruscan minor center, but became a praefectura and then a colonia in its later Roman incarnations.
administration.8 Such communities had a relatively favored status with respect to Rome.
This status was usually associated with a formerly independent native community that had entered into an alliance (foedera) with Rome, on either favorable or unfavorable terms (aequum or inaequum). Such alliances, often purchased by the partition and concession of a portion of the hinterland of a city, confirmed the autonomy of the community over its remaining territory.9 In contrast, a colonia designated a community founded or re-founded
under a charter issued by the authorities from Rome.10 Such communities could be planned
from the ground up as ex novo creations, or could be merely additions of new population to long occupied sites.11 In the former case, a significant reorganization of the landscape
accompanied the planning of the community. Often the colonial officials repartitioned the countryside into rectangular sections, a process called centuriation, and parceled them out to the new inhabitants.12 It appears that early on, sites with colonial status were the most
favored, although this designation would become less desirable than municipal status beginning in the 1st century A.D. A third designation, that of praefectura, also existed as a
label for an independent community. Only a few communities carried this type of designation, but all of them were important secondary centers tied to major Etruscan cities before the Roman conquest (e.g. Saturnia, Statonia, perhaps Forum Clodii and Forum
8Salmon 1970, 17; Harris 2000, 330-331. Obviously, this independence did not extend to the obligations of
Etruscan communities to the city of Rome.
9Harris 1965a; Harris 1971, 101-113.
10Cf. CIL 2.1964 Malaca was promoted to Latin Status at the same time that it was issued a municipal charter. 11Salmon 1970, 13-14.
12Salmon 1970, 20-22. This type of reorganization is best seen in the landscape around the colony of Cosa
founded in 273 B.C. and reinforced with new inhabitants in 197 B.C. The colony was placed on land confiscated from the Etruscan city of Vulci and there was a substantial reorganization of the countryside surrounding the colony. See Brown (1980, 8-10) and Rathbone (1981, 15-22) for the best discussions of this reorganization.
Aurelii).13 This status was a designation that recognized the new independence of the
communities from their former city-state, but did not go so far as to designate them as having colonial or municipal status.14 Nevertheless, these sites administered large portions
of the Etruscan landscape in the centuries following the conquest, although under the direct control of Roman officials.15
Urban Identity in the Etruscan and Roman World
As a number of authors have noted in recent years, a clear division in the site hierarchy of Pre-Roman Etruria exists between the sites at the top range of the scale and those of a second tier. The larger sites are the same ones that the literary sources clearly describe as major Etruscan urban communities.16 Sites in this category include the cities of
Veii, Volsinii, Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Vulci, Vetulonia, Populonia, Volterra, Pisa, Fiesole, Arezzo, Chiusi, Cortona, and Perugia.17 At the very bottom of this group hovers a pair of
sites, Roselle at forty-one hectares, and Falerii Veteres at twenty-eight hectares. As Judson and Hemphill have suggested, the limited size of Falerii Veteres can be ascribed to the fact that the site was not a true primate center for the Ager Faliscus.18 This small size for Falerii
Veteres is closer to the area occupied by most communities at the second level of the settlement hierarchy. Nevertheless, the fairly substantial distance between the site of Falerii
13Carandini 1985a, 53-56; 132-142; Harris 1971, 96. It is not clear what type of site the two fora mentioned above
were in the pre-Roman period. Saturnia and Statonia were important secondary centers associated with Vulci and Volsinii respectively.
14Harris 1971. 96. 15Harris 1971, 151-152.
16The vast majority of these sites are the ones described as participating in the cult of the federal shrine at the
fanum Voltumnae, or as being part of the Claudian monument of the Etruscan cities.
17Doganella, a site founded as a colony of Vulci in the late 6th century B.C. represents an exception to this pattern
of conjunction between literary and archaeological data.
Veteres and it’s nearest fully urban neighbors, coupled with the well-articulated social development of the residents of the site, tend to push it into the category of urban sites rather than secondary settlements.19 The political independence of Falerii also argues in
favor of urban classification. The small size of Etruscan Roselle is most likely the result of the site’s retarded initial growth because of the proximity of Vetulonia.20
With the Roman conquest, the picture became more complicated, as some Etruscan cities became municipia foederata with little or no change to their territorial structure. Others saw substantial reorganizations of their hinterland. The confiscation of territory accompanied this reconfiguration, as well as the severing of ties between primate and secondary communities within the hinterland. The residents of some of the secondary centers within these territories negotiated promotions to civic status under the new Roman configuration, while at the same time a number of completely new communities were founded as colonies, especially in the Southern Coastal region.21 The result was a more
complicated arrangement in which the landscape fragmented into a series of smaller hinterlands associated with an increasing number of primate centers. In many cases, the colonial foundations, not to mention the secondary centers involved in the process of promotion, were far below the clear size threshold represented by the Etruscan cities. Yet
19Judson and Hemphill 1981, 200. See Patterson (1997, 1) for the necessary social aspects needed for definition as
an urban community.
20The late growth of Roselle coupled with its position along a major node of communication at the edge of
Vetulonian territory suggests that the site may have originated as a dependent center of the former community only to assert its independence beginning in the final decades of the 7th century B.C. The concomitant loss of the
most prime agricultural land within its hinterland may have been a contributing factor to the demise of Vetulonia.
21In Northern Etruria colonial foundations were sparse and late. Only two are known before the period of the
Social War. The colonies at Luni and Lucca were both founded in an attempt to stabilize the territory of Pisa, not from any internal distress, but from the incursions of Gallic and Ligurian tribesmen.
they shared the same independent ability to manage their own hinterlands that had characterized the administrative organization of these sites.
Definition of urban communities within the transitional period of the Republic is exceptionally difficult due to the lack of articulated internal infrastructure of many city sites before the Augustan Age. The hallmarks of civic culture during the Imperial Period, theatres, bath complexes, organized fora with curia and comitia were developed only with the 3rd century B.C. or later. Size then must function as the primary determinant among sites in
classifying settlements as urban centers, sites that would have likely carried the Roman designation of municipia and colonia. Size alone does not have to be the deciding factor in labeling communities as urban. Several features of urban communities did develop as nearly universal requirements by the Republican Period. Cities nearly all had extensive fortifications by the 4th century B.C. Cities also were usually characterized by the presence
of a significant architectural focus, a poliadic cult. Etruscan cities also possessed a significant aristocratic presence as defined by conspicuous consumption of goods and labor in the construction of burial monuments and the deposition of grave gifts along side the dead. Less visible archaeologically are concerns of juridical independence that define cities. Cities usually had some form of popular or aristocratic decision-making council and a functional administrative independence
Ancient Conceptions of the Village: Vici, Pagi, and Castella
Notwithstanding the definitional problems encountered above in relation to the categorization of the sites occupying the upper portion of the settlement hierarchy, greater difficulties occur when archaeologists attempt to classify sites in the secondary position in the settlement hierarchy, the level of small dependent towns and villages. Creating a
definition for the Etruscan and Roman “village” is fraught with difficulty for a number of reasons. First, this type of site receives scarce coverage in the surviving ancient literature on Etruria, or even on the Italian Peninsula as a whole, for that matter. Such sites have also not been the focus of traditional antiquarian research, and have only begun to come into focus in the past few decades as the sheer bulk of their volume has begun to become apparent due to the discovery of hundreds of additional sites by archaeological survey.
It would be perhaps simpler to provide an operational definition of this type of site based on the characteristics of surface scatters by which archaeologists have identified these sites, but such a definition would be an etic category derived from modern conceptions of the urban and rural landscape of Etruria. No doubt, such a definition will be necessary if we are to employ the abundant data of archaeological survey in our own consideration of the development of the type. Nevertheless, it is also instructive to examine the sites of the settlement hierarchy in terms of their Latin terminology because such a definition affords the opportunity to examine an emic conception based on Roman, and as far as recoverable, Etruscan thinking. The goal then is to produce a definition that will create a workable category of sites that will reflect a type recognized by the Romans themselves. These emic types can be compared to differences in site morphology and function in order to tease out patterns and inconsistencies in the Roman conceptions of community status.
Part of the difficulty in defining the characteristics that constitute a village community within the Etruscan and Roman world is the ambiguous terminology that both ancient and modern authors have employed when referencing this type of site. We have only the sparse evidence for the terminology the Etruscans themselves would have employed for secondary nucleated centers. We do know the word used for village communities (ΤΥΘΙΝΑ), but know nothing of any distinctions made in the type. Etruscan
texts rarely reference even urban communities, and virtually ignore secondary settlements. As a result, we must fall back on Roman conceptions of the Etruscan settlement system.22
The Romans, as well as modern scholars, have often employed a number of different terms when describing sites of the village type throughout the empire, including but not limited to oppidum, castellum, forum, vicus, statio and pagus. If we are able to sort out some working definitions for each of these terms, it will be possible to use the textual sources that do describe communities labeled under them to reconstruct some of the basic features of their social and economic structure.
The term oppidum is most frequently applied to major nucleated agglomerations of