INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 37 - n.

1-2 (13-46) - 2022

Martinelli M. Ethnological Sources and Archaeological

Archaeologist, Cultural Museums
Unit’s Responsible.
Regione Toscana – Dept. of Cul-
tural, Museal and Documental
Heritage; UNESCO Sites; Con-
temporary Art.
Email:
maurizio.martinelli13@gmail.com
DOI: 10.14673/IJA2022121086
Key words: Economy, social
time, society, Archaeology, Africa,
Indonesia, Bronze Age, Iron Age,
Etruria.
Studies on Wealth Redistribution, on Social
models of “Duty” and of “Possibilities”,
in Etruscan and Italic Area
Time for Social Sharing versus
Time for Production.
The examination of how prehistoric and Bronze Age Italian
societies used time shows how the limited handicraft
activities to produce goods for exchange, left much time to
the individuals for carrying out other private and/or social
activities, that strengthened the sense of the collectivity. In the
Final Bronze Age the formation of wider communities led to
the abandonment of this socioeconomic scheme; the surplus of
goods accumulated by the upper class was socially reemployed
in encoded activities, and the “social” time subtracted from
collective activities inside the group - now invested in a personal
or family economic use - was replaced by the reinvestment of
relevant valuable goods, obtained as fruits of this subtracted
time: therefore the social cohesion wasn’t anymore achieved
with the use of time, but of goods. Some ethnographic
comparisons support such reconstruction of the transition
from reciprocity to redistribution, i.e. the first two of the three
integration forms of the economy. In the full Iron Age, Italy
sees the passage to aspects of a market economy, when some
new activities destined to the creation of social cohesion show
the growth of their allegorical and communication aspects. The
same age sees the passage from the prehistoric and protohistoric
rules of duty, to a new world pushed by the possibilities, to
which every member of the urban society shows to aspire.

The life of the single members of human communities has always been divided
between performing for the essential primary needs to survive, and time spent on
social activities, with an evident interaction between the two components. For
instance, in hunter-gatherers peoples of the Stone Ages, the activities of group big-
hunting were performed both for the group’s subsistence as for its effects on social
cohesion, with a collaboration generating rank among individuals depending from
abilities, physical strength and experience (Duches et al., 2010). This condition is
still verifiable, in vivo, in the rare living peoples of ethnological interest that preserve
primitive behaviors (Rivière, 1995).
Free time from the functions finalized to survive was destined, in wide part,
to other relations with social functions, of elevated cohesive value to form the
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identity of the group, in order to perform not only practical activities that needed the
collaboration of a high number of individuals – grouped by family or clan group-,
but very often also symbolic activities, as those of religious value, in which it was
possible to share the identity of the single community.
The site of Göbekli Tepe in the southeast of Turkey offers an example of great
interest: here, at the beginning of the Neolithic Age, a community of hunter-gatherers
achieved its own social and ideological cohesion performing collective parties,
during which an alcoholic drink was used, a sort of beer on fermented wild cereals.
So, already in this archaic age, the party and the collective use of foods and alcoholic
drinks make their apparition, demonstrating to be the basic symbolic components
of those social and cohesive activities that we will see across the millennia and the
Mediterranean - as other times and places - (Dietler, 2001).
With the Neolithic passage toward agriculture and breeding, the possibility
to produce and to store foods destined to subsistence changed dramatically the
employment of time, bringing a marked seasonality of the productive activities, and
– thanks to the use of the alimentary stocks in the inactive phases - allowing to use
leisure time in more consistent season blocks.
This new availability of food, linked with the possibility to accumulate a
seasonal surplus in agricultural commodities and in livestock, brought to an increase
of handicraft activities, developing - from production for personal use only - toward
a widened production in the finality of exchange with part of the food surplus
(Morehart, De Lucia, 2015). The appearance of metals, in the Neolithic-Eneolithic
and the Bronze Ages, even though absorbing only a contained part of the society
involved in mining and casting activities (Acconcia and Milletti, 2009), contributed
to the increase of the artisan activities and economy of exchange.
However, the limited economy and the small dimensions of craftsmanship -
especially in Italic area, in comparison to other Mediterranean zones involved in
precocious Palatial or Urban civilizations - left a wide space for the collective and
social activities, where time was converted in occasions of aggregation (Kristiansen,
2011). The mutual help was performed not only during the agricultural season, but
also in the construction of residences (often needing large manpower, like for some
great collective huts of the kind of those of Luni sul Mignone (Figure 1) built at
the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age, around 1700-1450 B.C., and used until
the Recent Bronze Age, around 1300 – 1175 B.C.), or in the realization of works of
“public” interest (Negroni Catacchio and Domanico, 2001) like defensive structures
in wood or stones, ditches, trenches etc., as those in San Giovenale (with a Recent
Bronze Age agger, around 1300 – 1175 B.C.), in Poggio la Croce, in the proximities
of Radda in Chianti (with a powerful defensive wall of the Final Bronze Age; Alfani
et al., 1998; Valenti, 1995) and recently in the Area 1 of Colle Rotondo near Anzio
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 15

(with an agger with wooden poles of the Final Bronze Age; Cifani et al., 2012).
Other moments of shared social and religious life are witnessed by the most
ancient known calendars, like the archaic Roman calendar that literary sources
attribute to the kingdom of Numa (717-673 B.C.) (Sabbatucci, 1988). Here there are
many festive days for group rites in days free from the primary productive activities,
used as opportunities of cohesion around cults of the collectivity. This founded the
identity of family groups or single settlements - as in archaeological sites close
to springs with food offerings, still in use in the Final Bronze Age and over -, or
sometimes of wider ethnic groups - as in the caves with burials or food offers, in
use only until the late Bronze Age - (Van Rossenberg, 2005; Van Rossemberg,
2005a). It is important to remember that the agricultural and pastoral life don’t
contemplate breaks from the job; this determines the necessity of ritual parties to
create aggregative pauses. Such a lifestyle, so tied up to the agricultural seasons,
to the lunar cycles, to the seasons of rain and of the crops, of the reproduction of
livestock, is connected a philosophical concept of time. This prehistoric time isn’t of
the linear kind (as in the scheme “past-present-future” in unidirectional continuous
motion, intended as “progress” as today it’s ruling) but “elliptic” and “circular”,
with an adhesion to the cyclicity of the nature and to a repetition of the activities and
gestures, that sets the future within a ring shared with the past, in which the present
is defined as the contingent positioning within a predictable cycle, something similar
to the cyclicity of history in Vico’s Scienza Nuova and to its “spiral” course, with a
circular and upward return.
Some ethnographic comparisons, although examined with all the necessary
cautions (Spence), can give us confirmations in vivo of similar behavioural and social
attitudes both in the daily life and in the productive forms. In some populations with
traditional cultures, in Africa as in Asia, the production of many artisan goods doesn’t
refer to market logic, but it is based only on demand and it produces only on request.
For example, in the area of Soddo in Ethiopia – thanks to some ethnological travel
notes offered to me by Massimo De Benetti, who was there in 2011 and to whom
goes my gratitude – it is referred that spears are still realized only by specialized
blacksmiths on request of hunters or warriors, who ask, for the commissioned pieces,
their own specifications to be applied in the product: on the base of the traditional
“type”, every buyer introduces changes in always new original spears, in a particular
way of producing to keep in mind, in the archaeological field, when identifying
“types” and models (Carancini, 1989) (Figure 2).
This way of production in every age leaves abundant time to craftsmen to carry
out other private and/or social activities, whose effect is the confirmation of the
priority of the relations on productive life, strengthening the sense of the group with
actions of economic value, that anyway don’t lessen the economic availability of
16 MARTINELLI

the single supplying person. These actions support the primary necessities, and are
included amongst the activities of social realization and value, not economic nor
financial (Fontaine, 2003). For instance, the collaboration for the construction of a
house, or a hut, or for the reaping, or for relatives and family care of children and
elderly, these are all activities performed without transfer of money, neither of goods,
but realized with the support and the mutual help of the participants, in a relationship
that does not move economic values but only a generic availability to help, that
strengthens the group - family, clan, territorial tribe - confirming the priority of this
value over the productive level. Similar systems have been reported, for instance,
in many tribes, as the Mamprusi of the Northeastern Ghana, used in the village of
Bende to a traditional activity in community construction of buildings (Calvo et al.,
2013) (Figure 3). It’s important to keep in mind that a similar social system linked to
the construction of a hut is presumed to be active also in Central Italy Protohistory
(Martinelli, 2017).
In Africa, scholars have well underlined that the perception of time differs deeply
from that of the Western way of life, being conceived for the person and not vice
versa; time is meant as occasion to meet, to listen to, to observe the reality of the world
in which we live as a context in which people, as the environment, are referred. In
Nigeria the sense of the community overcomes that of the single man, so each person
is not important as an individual, but only as a member of the community; what must
be pursued is the interest of the family, nuclear or widened, as in the clan group in
mutual help. The necessary time for a well-done activity doesn’t have an exact metric
measure, and the relationship strategies encompass economic activities, as shown
by S. Latouche observations on the “informal economy” of contemporary Africa,
generated from the local socioeconomic tradition. Inside it, “we are not in another
economy, we are in another society. The economic matter is dissolved, incorporated
in the social one, particularly in the complex nets”. In this kind of system, everyone
produces his own life “through relationship strategies. These strategies encompass
every sort of economic activity, which are not professional (or only a little)”. Such
embryonic strategies of production and economic activities, often expedients with
which to get by, are performed in nets that, from family, can widen and become a
sort of very numerous “widened family”; such economy (“neoclanic oikonomia”) is
based on a non-professional multi-activity, supported by relationship strategies. “[In]
this life made of expedient, in which the production of goods and services are mixed,
the commerce, the exchange of gifts [...] and, above all, of words [...] the meetings,
the visits, the receptions, the discussions take a lot of time. To borrow and loan, to
give, to receive, to reciprocally help, to make an order, to deliver, to inform, all this
takes a great part of the day, not mentioning the time devoted to party, to dance, to
dream or to game. «The party -writes Eric de Rosny - occupies an immoderate place
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 17

in proportion to the financial wealth of the population; all the economists know this,
but it is appropriate to the affective needs»”. So, in some main idioms in Africa,
where there is no specific word to point out the “poor”, the population use a term that
refers to the “orphan”, referring to someone deprived of social support and of people
that can assist him. In the “informal” socioeconomic system, “all the economical
incomes, commodities or money are immediately invested within the social network,
because it is an obligation, because it anticipates the necessity to take out a loan,
and also to let relatives take profit of what you just had, and to give them pleasure.
Everyone is conscious that a benefit is never lost. [...] In this neoclanic society [...]
the social bond works on the basis of exchange: but the exchange system, with or
without money, is based more on the gift than on the market. There is the threefold
obligation to give, to receive, and to return as Marcel Mauss analyzes. The central
and fundamental thing in this logic of gift is the fact that the bond replaces the good”
(Latouche).
So, in simple societies of ethnological interest, the procurement of goods for
surviving reasons does not imply accumulation except in agriculture - where it’s
automatically produced by its seasonality -. Hunting, for instance, does not imply
an overkilling for commerce and storing, but is intended only for the use in the
contingent need - also due to the difficulties of meat preserving -, as it also happens
for handicrafts of the artisan production, that are not overproduced and stored for
“store stocking”, but are produced on request, or realized at the moment of need
of goods to exchange, once the necessity to acquire manufactured articles not self-
producible is created. In these societies this situation is also linked with the absence
of a preventive “financing” system for the purchase of raw materials, that would
be necessary for a preventive serial production that can lock up the raw materials
and the manufactured articles’ value for an indefinite, long time. Other dissuasive
factors to a serial production for the market economy are the low technology, and,
paradoxically, the absence of a series of immediate costs in the same subsistence
(but different from the food, as in our contemporary societies are the costs for water,
heating and illumination; for services etc.), to sustain which the widening of the
production for a new income can sometimes be determined. The limitation of the
artisan production can also be linked to the restriction of the market - where it is not
necessary an overproduction of goods for selling purposes, with a longer production
time -, and to the limitation or total absence of surplus, necessary to create customers
interested not only in primary goods.
In this social and productive system, the great value given to the more complex
artisan-manufactured articles determine their long functional and/or symbolic life,
with re-use and restoration in case of limited damages or simple consumption; this is
accompanied by the frequent value of token of family prestige, and with the heredity
18 MARTINELLI

of these goods themselves, as rare examples of the important purchase of goods

external to the standard acquisition from the social sphere (Iaia, 2007).
It’s worthy of notice that ethnographic studies on the mentioned Mamprusi
inhabitants of the Bende village in Ghana revealed that in the local community
the social organization is based “on a patrilinear system, structured in different
lineages that descend from a common ancestor and that bring together the different
families. Four lineages exist in the village of Bende, and these lineages successively
occupy the leadership of the village, are under the control of a territory chiefdom
and, ultimately, are under the power of the Na-Yiri, the king of the Maprusis. The
domestic structure, which is embodied in a housing complex, consists of an extended
family group, at the head of which is the landlord. He is responsible for organising
the distribution of land, marriage and ancestor worship. […] In Bende, […] most of
the rituals continue to focus on the worship of ancestors. In this sense, the domestic
space is closely linked to the sacred, through natural elements, libations, small altars
and graves of family ancestors, linking the group with their forefathers” (Calvo et al.,
2013). This description is very similar to that of the inhabitants of the island of Nias
in Indonesia, in Western Sumatra, that remained isolated until the end of the19th
century (Scarduelli, 1986), and it could perfectly be applied also to the populations
of the passage between the Bronze and Iron Age in Central Italy.
Likewise, in the Italic society of the different phases of the Bronze Age and until
the first Iron Age, the time of the individuals was probably largely - and perhaps
mainly - invested in relation activities, as has been hypothesized for the realization
of works as the vast chief’s hut (as in Luni sul Mignone for the great building of the
Final Bronze Age, around 1175-950 B.C.), or for collective/family activities, that
asked for a large quantity of working time and skilled adults - as various activities
of experimental reconstruction have shown - (Martinelli, 2006). The same idea of
work as social activity is still performed today, for instance, by the inhabitants of
the mentioned Indonesian island of Nias, where the leader of the village decides
not only on “public” works (opening and maintenance of paths, bridges, channels,
defensive walls), but also on “the use of people’s manpower for the harvest of the
rice in the leader’s own fields, for the construction of his house, and for the transport
of megaliths whose erection is destined to increase his prestige (Scarduelli, 1986).
Pottery production in the most ancient stages of Metal Ages was part of the
same quoted context of limited handicraft production - although in a rather elevated
number of elements, around 100 for family nucleus, according to the excavations
of the Ancient Bronze Age in the village of Nola (Van Rossenberg, 2005b) -, made
on specific request based on the actual needs of the consumers, by specialized
artisans working on demand, whose products were however unable to characterize
“professionally” the individual manufacturers.
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According to the general data for the Recent and Final Bronze Age, the same
connotation in funerals of each single individual did not absolutely underline the
roles and the functions, and the first activities put in slight evidence in the Final
Bronze Age (Latial Phase I, 11-10th cent. B.C.) were referred to the social world of
men only (warriors, priests), while functional activities for women weren’t shown,
and these will be witnessed by deposition objects from the first Iron Age (Latial
Phase IIA-IIB), underlining only functions performed inside the family (for instance
food serving) or of self-production economy (pottery manufacturing, spinning,
weaving). In Central Italy, still at the beginning of the Iron Age between 10th and
9th century B.C., the handicraft production of particular goods as bronze vessels was
sporadic: “the absence of comparisons […] is one of the many evidences of the not
serial, almost «occasional» nature, of the most ancient production of bronze vases of
the Center-Italic First Iron Age; the latter actually seems mainly the work of single
artisans with exceptional technical ability - tied up directly to elitist purchasers
(to whom they were perhaps bound as clientes), and consequentially perhaps also
subject to a certain mobility - rather than a production of true “workshops” at the
service of wide social classes, a circumstance that will emerge only during the 8th
century B.C. and on. Another evidence of the episodic and non-serial nature of the
bronze vessels production during this period comes from the rather limited number
of samples of bronze foil cinerary urns” (Iaia, 2007).
Also hoards of bronze fragments - expressions of a social activity disappearing
in Italic Area with the late Iron Age – can be referred to a manufacturing system that
does not use the whole available raw material for a massive production of artefacts,
within an economy where raw material is preferentially collected in hoards, that
is, in cultual places alternative to the burial sites, selected to be the expression of
the high status of the social élite within the wide communities of the Final Bronze
Age (Van Rossenberg, 2005; Van Rossenberg, 2005a; Acconcia, Milletti, 2015). This
system operates without transformation of the whole available bronze in end goods,
but waits for an effective necessity to make objects (as in case of the breakup of the
precedents handicrafts, that are frequently collected in bronze hoards, waiting to be
recycled).
In this Protohistoric system, also the typologies of the handicrafts must be
included within the many variations realized on the specifications of the buyer
and on his request, where the more or less substantial variations introduced on a
basic typology of handicraft are corollary of a productive and social system. So, we
probably have to revise the fact that this products can be intended as “serial” in the
studies, implying a repetitive and “mechanic” reproduction of the same typology,
that nevertheless refers to an industrial production, rather than to the “on demand”
production of the ancient times and of the basic economic systems.
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The only recorded context in Italy that, during the Final Bronze Age, witnesses
a kind of “industrial production” for an extended market, is the policentric settlement
of Frattesina, in the surroundings of Fratta Polesine (Rovigo) in the Po valley. Here
the findings show many diffused ateliers working – in colossal quantities – deer
horn, glass, bronze from Eastern Alps and Tuscany, amber from the Baltic Sea,
elephant ivory, ostrich eggs, most certainly for a widened market. The position of
Frattesina – north of the Adriatic Sea, in a privileged position on the routes between
the Mediterranean Sea and the Central and Northern Europe - seems to have caused
this unique productive context thanks to the movements on the Mediterranean of
Eastern prospectors, probably through Cyprus, coming from places where the Palatial
and urban civilisation was already widespread. The movements of prospectors from
Greece on the Adriatic Sea are witnessed – according to many studies – by the archaic
tales of legendary travels in lands inhabited by monsters like Sirens, located in this
sea before being intended on the Tirrenian Sea as the exploring movements along
the Italic coasts were going east in the beginnings of the 8th cent. B.C. (Martinelli
2021; Mele, 2016).
However, the presence of this unique emporion in Italy – with only one other
similar in Central and Western Europe, that is Huelva in the South-West of Spain, a
little later - confirms that the “preindustrial” production model of Frattesina was an
exception in Italy, where the on demand production was generally widespread (Bietti
Sestieri, 2008).
Thinking of artefacts production and ritual collective use of time, one must
note that in Center-Eastern Alpine Italy, and specifically in Atesine Area and in
Trentino, already in the Final Bronze Age (between the 12th and the beginnings
of the 10th century B.C.) some of the rare bronze goods produced, such as the pins
– but sometimes also weapons, ornaments, utensils - were ritually destroyed in
characteristic “votive fires” during religious rituals, connected to inhabited villages,
when jugs were also employed for libations, and then were shattered during the rite
of combustion. Such a phenomenon, that not by chance has been read as a social
event of aggregation for single or few communities, or for district areas, could be
part of those religious activities that, involving the destruction of primary goods or
prestigious goods, were one of the tools employed by embryonic élites or single
emerging individuals, within protohistoric collectivities, “to confirm and to maintain
their own role in lack of a social rigidly constituted hierarchy”, anticipating - in
some aspects like collective ceremonies and the use of drinks - the social symbolic
activities of the imminent Iron Age (Bellintani, 2000). Especially, the consumption
of alcoholic drinks in social, ceremonial happenings has recently found precocious
documentation in the whole of Italy – Northern, Central and Southern – during
the Recent Bronze Age, between the 13th and the first half of 12th century B.C.
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 21

(Iaia, 2013), linking to an empiric and local way of fermenting wild grapes or fruits
collected, to obtain the temetum of the archaic Latin sources, constituting the core of
peculiar rites of collective consumption (Marcone, 1997; Delpino, 2007; Iaia, 2013;
Martinelli, 2019).
The introduction in Etruscan and Italic Area - mainly from the 8th century B.C.
- of wider communities - with both a wider territorial control and a bigger population
-, and of a consequent, more complex social organization, structured on more levels
not all in direct relationship as in the “primary groups”, brought to the abandonment
of precedent socioeconomic schemes with the introduction of a consistent surplus
(Martinelli, 2004). This was now possible with the overabundance of available raw
materials, within very wide territories, and also with the availability for production
of a part of the time before invested in social relationships, time that in this new
society was available for work, because of the impossibility to cultivate direct social
relations between the whole of the community. The surplus production employed
some development of the technologies, both for metal and pottery work, mostly due
to influences external to the Italian Area, and “brought [...] to the definition of the
full-time artisan, fully integrated, who can earn from his own activity what he needs
to live” (Bartoloni, 1989).
Such a surplus could be accumulated - in goods - by the most elevated class,
that kept for itself access to the sources to raw materials and to the land ownership;
nevertheless, this class was forced to use this same surplus to reconstruct, on a
different level, those social relations and confirmation of their own status that were
before assured by the investment of the social free time. The construction of the
mansions for the different principes and of the colossal impressive tumulus graves
in the advanced Orientalizing Age, was still performed using the free time of the
subject population (Martinelli, 2010), but this age saw also the birth of some new
social rites, intended to better bind the community using economic values that were
absent before or not accumulated as in this age. An example of socially qualifying
re-distribution ritual in the society of the 7th century B.C. is the banquet, that
leaves so many traces in the funeral depositions of this age, being the moment
of the redistribution of the surplus accumulated in livestock and food, preceding
the diffusion of the symposion, that is drinking in ceremonial group, using wine -
produced with new processes of Greek and Eastern origin – as a new fundamental
resource of the agriculture (Bartoloni, 2003). The first signs in Etruria of this passage
to new symbolic collective activities date just before the half of the 9th century
B.C., as it shows in Tarquinia “the cremation grave Monterozzi 3, in the Arcatelle
necropolis, characterized by an exceptional association, with a crested helmet in
bronze foil (the most ancient example known in Italy), a long sword, a serpentine
fibula with gold covering; amongst the bronze artefacts in the grave there was a cup
22 MARTINELLI

(attingitoio) of Center-European type and a miniature tripod table. In this funerary

set there is, perhaps for the first time in Italian Protohistory, an indication of an élite
distinctive practice of food sharing: the tripod table, on which two vascular forms
are applied in miniature (two dishes or bowls with edge of different form), and that
reproduces a model of long duration (attested from the 11th to the 7th century B.C.),
particularly seems to symbolize the moment of the consumption of solid foods […]
And it is to underline that in this period the allusions to ceremonial drinking still
have in burials a prevailing individual connotation, different from the collective
“symposiac” value, that will spread only starting from a moment in the middle of the
8th century B.C.” (Iaia, 2007) (Figure 4).
This evolution of the social and productive organization - elements reciprocally
connected, with a circular cause-effect relationship in a mirror and closed cycle - where
the production increase generates rich holders of surplus that, in a chain, activate a
commissioned and specialized production that break with the traditional forms of
employment of the productive and social time, appears irreversibly widespread in
Southern Etruria already at the beginnings of the second phase of the first Iron Age
(first half-half of the 8th century B.C.): “while in the initial stage of the Early Iron
Age (10-9th century B.C.) it was possible to see the existence of single figures with a
social importance, partly with political prominent roles (graves with helmets, swords
and bronze vessels), in this period the formation of a real aristocratic class seems
already completed, where the female component becomes slowly integrated in the
management of masculine power. The deposition of cremated bones in bronze vessels
of extremely elaborate production - probably made by a single artisan or by a small
workshop producing principally on direct commission -, and the exceptional value
of this ritual and of the ornamental set in the grave, actually marks the individual
inclusion in a narrow entourage of chosen people, that tends to differentiate itself
radically from the mass, adopting some distinctive symbologies” (Iaia, 2007).
The use of the same surplus available to the newborn aristocracies for the
reconstruction, on a symbolic level, of those social relationships destined to the
confirmation of their own status, that before was achieved with the investment of
the social free time, is well synthesized in this analysis of C. Iaia: “The adoption
of ways of ceremonial drinking, partially similar to the uses of the Greek archaic
symposium, that occurred in Etruria during the later 8th century, it indicates – more
than an interaction among the two worlds (now beginning to progressively become
more intense) - the parallel carrying out of same socio-political phenomena: also in
Etruria, especially, the emerging aristocracies, in a political and economic context
running toward an urbanization among the most precocious of Mediterranean
Europe, they develop the necessity to integrate and attract wide social layers under
their guide, elaborating ritual forms of convivium, that also implicate mechanisms of
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 23

redistribution of food (especially meat and wine). Such urban epilogue has its roots in
the period that we have above examined (between the end of the 10th and beginnings
of the 8th century B.C.), when the small élites of Southern Etruscan area, before the
relationship with the Greek and Oriental world became systematic and wide, began
in an entirely autonomous way to experiment new forms of material expression of
social status, and of ritual food consumption, developed in the form of refined metal
productions (tripod tables, cups, biconical vases, thymiatheria, cauldrons) [...] up to
form, at the start of the 7th century, that extraordinary cultural mélange that takes the
name of “Orientalizing Culture” (Iaia, 2007).
Similar processes and social connections are attested in ethnological research,
for instance, among the inhabitants of Nias island for the ascent of social rank, with
a cursus honorum rigidly regulated and tied up to the realization of banquets or
redistribute parties - named locally owasa or tawila - with a forced number of killed and
cooked animals, that is added to the already mentioned system of manpower used for
the construction of the hut of the leader. Here, in fact, the leader of the village - balö si
ulu -, who can accumulate surplus also thanks to “fines” imposed during judgements,
reconverts this surplus in power and prestige “through redistibute activities in the
form of great collective parties (tawila). People has precise expectations from the
ruler, who cannot avoid the obligation to immolate, on the occasion of the tawila,
about ten pigs. But the balö si ulu is not the only person who can organize this kind
of party: all the adult members of masculine sex of the community are authorized to
prepare tawila, according to established formalities, rigorously fixed in relationship
to their rank. The tawila, in fact, form the institutional channels for the acquisition
of prestige and play, as bases of the rank system, an essential function in the process
of social reproduction”. Every individual - sato or si ulu - after marriage starts to
collect his surplus for his first tawila, by which he starts to acquire prestige, but,
if he wants to be able to ascend in the hierarchy, he must organize other tawila: to
become si ila he must do another one, and then, to become a balo si ila, another
three - the maximum that is allowed the common people, that usually find it difficult
to organize even the first one -. The aristocratic members must organize at least six
tawila parties - with, respectively, 50, 3, 50, 10, 50 and 100 slaughtered pigs (in the
last one it is also necessary to cut off a human head) -, to each of which corresponds
the right to get a new honorary title, until the aristocrat reaches the position of si
ulu simaawali. Now, the aristocrat pretender in the position of ruler must organize
another five tawilas, with the slaughtering of 100 pigs each time, and with another
very serious obligation to each party: to the first one, the ritual killing of an enemy
and cutting off his head; to the second, the consecration of about two kilos of gold;
to the third, the making of a cuirass, a helmet and a sabre, all of them gilded; the last
two tawilas are accompanied by the most onerous activities, that is the construction
24 MARTINELLI

of the house of the leader (omo sebua) with a ritual killing, and the erection in front
of the omo sebua of a big megalith (Scarduelli, 1986) (Figures 5-6).
Helped by these ethnographic paragons, we can assume that in the passage
from the Final Bronze Age to the first Iron Age and to the Orientalizing cultural
facies, in the Etruscan area, we see a complete transition from the reciprocity to the
redistribution, that is, between the first two of the three forms of integration of the
economy in the society according to Karl Polanyi (reciprocity, redistribution, market
exchange) (Polanyi, 2000). In the form of reciprocity the economic fundament is
the gift, studied by Marcel Mauss, by which mutual exchanges confer a central
value to the individuals and above all to the relationships, setting in a central role
the interpersonal and social bonds that are symbolised by the mutual gift. In the
redistribution form, a central organism has the role of centralizing and collective
distributor of goods to society - as the ruling aristocrats or principes will do in the
Orientalizing phase -. So, the goods and the produced services are transferred to
this central organism, that subsequently sees to redistribute them to the collectivity
through its own methodologies - sometimes also highly symbolic or ritual -. The third
form of integration is the market exchange, a complex system where, in the society,
“everything is market.” If in the former two socioeconomic forms the merchant
dimension is strongly marginalized, in the “market society” it is predominant, to the
point of bending all the social activities, and the same models of the society, to the
demands of the markets, with a strong and continuous fluctuation of the values.
The acquisition of goods from the relations’ and social sphere, rather than from
the productive and commercial world, will anyway eloquently continue to work in
Central Italy for various categories of prestigious goods still at the beginnings of
the 7th century B.C., when manufactured articles of elevated value - as ivories or
“Phoenician cups” in silver - they will be exchanged as gifts between individuals
of high rank at very ample distances – sometimes also from the Assyrian zone -
to seal social more than economic relationships (Sciacca, 2007). Even when these
manufactured handicrafts will be locally imitated in Italic area, their production will
not become widespread, neither “market-oriented”, but will maintain the character
of exception, and the destination to the social and symbolic function of gift: “within
the local productions of bronze relief cups in bronze, inspired by oriental imported
models, a group of samples is clearly recognizable as referred to a nucleus of few
Etruscan artisans that worked in a same shop and in a limited time (second quarter
of the 7th century B.C.), whose products are found in few but exceptional funeral
contexts [...] The limited number of cups and of contexts in comparison to the wideness
of the area where they are found seems to exclude both a mobility of the craftsmen
and different buyers of a single “fashion” shop. More probable it is a circulation
of these objects between aristocrats as gifts” (Sciacca, 2007). Another meaningful
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 25

example of the same kind of quality production, commissioned and external to a

real “market”, is formed by a group of bucchero valuable cups “kyathoi” - strictly
linked with the collective drinking of wine, in an èlite way of life - that, in spite of
their diffusion on a vast area (from Caere to Vetulonia, Clusium, Monteriggioni,
Murlo, Casale Marittimo, San Casciano in Val di Pesa) (Figures 7-8), because of
the substantial identity and numerical rarity were probably produced in one only
atelier in Caere as gift, as confirmed by the “speaking” dedication inscriptions on
them, with the name of the benefactor engraved on the still uncooked vase, attesting
the destination of the product as a gift before its physical production, and where
sometimes - as in Caere, Tomb I of the S. Paul’s tumulus - the word usually used
(muluvanike, that is “gave”) has an ergative suffix that rather makes the translation “
made me give” (Rizzo, 2001; Sciacca, 2007; Scarrone, 2014).
A similar interest in “social” time, more than in “economic” time, within a
world of redistributive relationships, does not concern only civilizations of remote
ages or places, but - exclusively inside narrow systems – could for instance be seen,
until the middle of twentieth century, inside the life of the Italian farms ruled in
sharecropping (“mezzadria”) system (Figure 9). Here activities as the harvesting
and the threshing of crops were performed by the mutual free job of neighbouring
families - all under a single land ownership of a nobleman -, in a system that
strengthened the social relationships with final collective lunches –more abundant
than the family daily meal in order to improve the social image -. The agricultural
production of the farmers, destined for one half to the noble’s farm and for the other
half to the ownership of the sharecropper (“mezzadro”) himself, did not allow for
the sharecropping family “a mezzadria” an “absolute” financial availability with
its surplus, but only a “virtual” credit – economic, but not immediately financial -
recorded by the local noble family and used financially only in case of a particular
necessity like wedding or, more frequently, for the acquisition of additional tools for
working or for livestock. The time for working, tied up obviously to the seasonality,
left ample but not regular space to the social life inside and outside of the family
(this last of widened proportions and of a patriarchal kind as in the Etruscan “gens”
system), to which was attributed a wide series of functions with economic value
without the move of finance (for instance, workmanship of wicker, yarns and fabrics,
of some simple utensils, and also of complex manufactured articles as in the self-
production of wagons, reparation and maintenance of goods and tools). In the same
way, the exchange of reproducible food stuff - as eggs or hens - allowed on smaller
local markets the acquisition of other primary goods or other manufactured articles
not available on the spot, as a corollary of productive social activities carried out by
the family groups. It is interesting to observe how behavioural stimuli were often still
absent in the production of determined goods external to the extensive monocultures
26 MARTINELLI

imposed by the noble holders of the farm, as for instance of various vegetables, that
also in the overabundance of available land were not self-produced, but purchased
with exchange, keeping a distance from the model of production for financial ends,
and with the use of exchange, in a very limited surplus production.

For the following period, many are obviously the archaeological records in
Central Italy of the increasing conversion of the social time in time for productive
economic activity, with a further evolution of the production, in the centuries from
the 7th B.C., toward the pure market exchange. Amongst the most recent examples,
some researches on the territory of Clusium are of high interest, especially the results
of the archaeological and anthropological analyses on the depositions and the human
bones found in the Etruscan necropolis of the Pianacce of Sarteano, in the Province
of Siena. The materials from this site date back to a period between the 6th and
the 2nd century B.C., and allow an integrated reading of the use of working time
and for social activities, meaningful in the construction of a net of interpersonal
relations. As it has been shown by the scientific staff of the Archaeological Museum
of Sarteano, that has conducted the archaeological investigation on the ground,
and then studied and published the context (Figures 10-11), the social group that
gravitated around the necropolis - constituted by about thirty individuals during the
whole specific chronological period, collected in different tombs for separate family
groups, but without doubts connected as relatives (as it is shown by the horizontal
diffusion of genetic illnesses) - was formed by people “without doubts land owners
with a remarkable economic availability […] but they show some characteristics
of their daily way of life, inferable from the characteristics of their bone rests, that
apparently seems in contrast with such a wealth […] all the studied individuals under
the anthropological point of view show in their skeletal apparatus the heavy signs
of a manual job or of an handicraft activity. This element should make us reflect on
what were the daily occupations of these individuals” (Minetti, 2012).
The period of the different family chamber graves of the necropolis, with the
deposition of luxury goods and the construction of external infrastructures - going
from the half of the 6th to the 2nd century B.C., as the bone fragments - is an historical
phase in which the formation a complex society is already well consolidated on
the productive and social level, in Etruria and in the area of reference within the
Clusium’s territory. These data demonstrate how the working time spent by single
individuals in productive and handicraft activities - repeated for a long time, to wear
out their bones -, was very abundant, and it involved not only the poorest classes,
but also the richer landowners. Even if the Sarteano necropolis has to be referred to
a collectivity living in an area in the surroundings, but external to the urban Etruscan
town of Clusium, the level of wealth shown by these individuals, already by the
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 27

end of the 6th century sec. B.C., is equal to that of the rich classes of the great
near cities - Orvieto, Faliscan territory - and perhaps also higher than the wealth
level shown by the contemporary graves that surround the city of Clusium (Minetti,
2012). Furthermore, to properly testify the approach of production and society to
market logics, and the diffusion of specialized productive functions - with the birth
of handicraft workshops in the ager Clusinum at the half of the 6th century - there is
also the contemporary ceramic atelier of Petriolo (Figures 12-13), set on a plateau
in the surroundings little west of Clusium; this structure constitutes a document of
the realization, by specialized artisans, of pottery products destined to face the wide
request created by the formation of the city (Martinelli, 2017; Tuck, Wallace; 2013).
This forms a radical change in comparison to the former “centralized” production
of the neighbor great atelier in Murlo, set in a roofed, long open building of around
51 meters, at least 6 meters wide (650 – 600 B.C.), preceding Petriolo in time, and
erected close to the dynastic palace of a family of rural principes, where ivory, horn
and bone were worked, and where ceramics, architectural reliefs and small bronzes
were produced. There were also areas of weaving, for the transformation of corn,
and probably also for the production of olive oil: here the realization of every kind
of product of primary necessity or voluptuary was conferred to artisans which,
most probably, were workers subdued to the local dynastic ruler (Figures 14-15). In
opposition, with the 6th century B.C. the complete formation of the cities in Etruria
determines the birth of a real market, formed by free citizens, where everyone carries
out a “specialized” activity and relies on other artisans or merchants, according to
his own wealth availability (Martinelli, 2008; Martinelli, 2017; Bauer et al., 2017).
In these times Etruscan ad Italic inner lands were areas with a strong agricultural
vocation, and well organized in urban cities ruled by monarchies or by complex
organism composed of magistrates within a system of noble gentes, managing the
social relationships as well as productive matters (Attema, Schörner, 2022). Here
archaeological records demonstrate how now in the daily life - for all the social
classes - much time was invested in the production of goods, in commercial flows
of surplus production, and destined to a widened commerce not only on limited
demand but with creation of product storages. This led to a consequent further
reduction of the free time reserved to the consolidation of social relationships and
of the sociocultural structure - once performed by practical activities destined to the
strengthening of the status quo and of the bonds between people and families -.

With the complete formation of the polis in Central Italy, indeed, also a class
of urban artisans get defined in the widened society, able to sign – from 6th and 5th
cent. B.C. – their artifacts with their own name, and sometimes also with the name of
the gens. This demonstrates they weren’t necessarily of lower social level, and that
28 MARTINELLI

they could affirm they personality through the access to the written communication,
widened also to non-aristocratic persons. Similarly, inscriptions by merchants and
wholesalers active in the whole of the central Mediterranean testify of these socially
emerging elements in an innovative framework of supply of goods and services. The
whole of these individuals, in many different ways, went to satisfy new needs of
urban private clients, which were expanding out of the perimeter of the noble circles,
and entering into the orbit of the so-called “middle class” and of the newly formed
gentes, requesting for access to potentialities otherwise and previously forbidden -
socially and behaviorally -.
In this moment the society of the cities leaves collectively the monarchies and the
duties imposed by unwritten royal laws (leges regiae), creating republican regimes
that delimit the potential faculties of individuals with public laws - as the XII Tables
of Laws in Rome-. The same cultural, social and psychological climate penetrates
also the private and behavioural life of individuals, with new formae mentis, ways
of mind that break into the life of society. This change within Etruscan and Italic
society in the approach to human functions is of fundamental importance because,
at the same time, it will be applied -by representatives of the same social groups-
to all the major “categories” of human social activities, already existing from the
pre- and protohistoric age. So, as in war and in religious life, from the duty of full
male citizens only, there is a relevant passage to the expression of the potentialities
of the different members of the society, and also economic flows within society
undergo the same transformation. Previously, there was an initial duty to regulate the
flows of the pre- and proto-urban world, with the duty of concealing socio-economic
differences, reducing the funeral goods and kind of burials of the Early Iron Age.
Conversely, with the mature Villanovan Culture and with the Orientalizing period,
appears the duty of social exhibition of the economic supremacy as a social status of
the noble oligarchies of the reges and principes. With the new urban organization, the
potential of flows and needs is opened up by the economic growth of the “middle”
classes, dedicated to urban productive activities capable of exploiting the potentials
of new markets and new levels of needs.
The final decades of the VI cent. B.C. are the years when the forms of monarchical
and/or tyrannical government are put into crisis in the cities, now fully organized
and articulated in extended societies composed also of artisans and traders, who
promoted a new circulation of wealth within a more “liquid” society, in which the
old social and political forms crumble, without being replaced by new and well-
structured forms. The fall of tyranny in Athens in 510 BC, in Rome in 509, and
also in various Etruscan cities in the same period, are the mirror of an extensive
Mediterranean transformation, with a growth of individual aspirations (Torelli 1990;
Ferrandes, 2017; Di Fazio 2020; Martinelli 2021). In this passage we must read
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 29

an extensive process of subjectification, which takes place within the extended and
definitely urban society, in some ways symmetrically opposed to the objectification
of behavior in the previous proto-historical and archaic society. It is a phase that,
with the due differences, has some similarities with the modern phases of post-
scarcity (Sacco, 2016).
Nevertheless, regarding the new forms of shared and non-economic activities
destined to the construction and consolidation of social relationships in this period, it
is important to point out that inside the same necropolis of the Pianacce in Sarteano a
circular “theatre” structure has been unearthed, built with square stones, and connected
to three underlying chamber tombs, dated to the final decades of the 6th century B.C.
The circular structure was used for the exposure of the dead before they were buried
in the underlying rooms, as well as for those recreational and spectacular collective
activities that - from the 6th century B.C. right at the time of the first formation of
the urban cities – started to spread in the different Etruscan areas, both in great cities
and in most peripheral areas (Minetti, 2012) (Figure 10). For their large and massive
structure, such buildings had a high cost in economic terms - because of the abundant
manpower invested in the construction of these architectural elements well visible
to the collectivity -; the related recreational and ritual activities also were complex
and expensive. Therefore, these performance structures and their public rituals
played in the same time both a symbolic function of family wealth with an elevated
spectacular effect on people (widely drawn in funeral reliefs as “photographs” of
the burial rituals), as well, displaying redistributive values, shown with great funeral
banquets, with athletes’ engagement and supply of rich prizes offered to the winners
of the athletic contest, in a Homeric reminiscence. This apparatus suggested not
only the wealth, but also the rank and the social function of the offering family, as
of the connected gens. Such a display of organizational capabilities, of gathering
people to participate in the funerals and in the ludi, and in investing resources and
time on permanent funeral and theatrical structures - in substitution of the time
invested in less archaeologically visible activities during the preceding centuries,
less “spectacular” and probably with a less structured, but more direct complexity
–, performed the essential function of collecting all the components of the family,
of the gens and the related clientes, with the aim of recognizing themselves as a
united group. This enforced the kind of relationships amongst members, including
the position of the single ones in the hierarchical relationships that such status
implied, in confirmation of the social relationships shown during the funerals, that
is in a moment of crisis, in which the loss of an eminent figure - with his role in the
directive structure of the group – could have brought into question the status quo and
the previous relationships.
30 MARTINELLI

So - within a society more diffusely occupied, in terms of time, in productive

activities for the surplus goods destined for a commercial and economic use - these
buildings and their rites clearly show the re-investment of a consistent part of the
economic goods obtained just with the investment of time, otherwise socially spent.
By the construction of strong architectural evidences, by shows opened to the
individuals making part of the gens, by largely participated redistributive banquets,
that is, by an articulated series of activities socially encoded in urban complex
civilizations, was obtained - through new rules - the social cohesion that could no
longer be reached with the investment of the now reduced “social time”.
In other words, the social time before invested by simple societies in collective,
solidarity or simply social activities, once removed from these direct functions
inside the reference group - to be invested in a personal or family use of economic
kind destined to the surplus accumulation -, shows to have been replaced by the re-
investment of a part of the fruits of such removal - that is, of economic goods -, that
however are destined to the same goals of social cohesion, now achieved spending
goods, more than time.
In this change, it is evident how the new activities destined to create a social
cohesion, even if belonging partly to preexisting codes (sharing of moments as
the consumption of the food, the party, the mourning), now have a very complex
behavioural, executive and formal coding, connected to aspects of politics and
society, as well as of religion. Very remarkable and in progressive growth in time
is the symbolic component, that somehow “allegorises” the actions of social value,
as a translation, towards a world of hidden symbols, of those that before were
practical activities, directly functional in the life of each individual. In this symbolic
translation, the communication weight of the performed actions with social value
exponentially increases, a proportional way inverse to their simplicity: so social
cohesion is no longer achieved through a direct support, but symbolically through
the communication world. This became necessary in the world created by the urban
organizational model, that collected an elevated quantity of individuals without
the possibility of direct relations, as is confirmed by a clear demographic growth
recorded in Etruria from the 7th century B.C. The population increase, and the
consequent widening of the relationship network was then accompanied by a more
complex vertical structure of the Etruscan society, in which, with the formation of the
city, the growth of the disproportions in the socioeconomic and politic world became
so wide that it was no more sociologically possible to have only direct relationships
among all the individuals of the society - as it is possible only within the simple or
“primary” groups of a few people -. Stratified and multilevel relationships became
indispensable, where the physical relationships were replaced by symbolic and
somehow more “metaphysical” ones, because of their patterns fixed in cultural areas
external to the single persons.
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 31

This proposed analysis of time use, in traditional societies of archaeological,

anthropological and ethnological interest both of the past and of contemporary ages,
allows the reconstruction of some historical and dynamic models of social cohesion,
mainly achieved with a specific use of time - spent more in relation activities than
in work, to strengthen the interrelations amongst individuals as amongst different
groups that intersect horizontally and vertically the society -. This offers suggestions
of great interest for modelling the so-called future “post-development era”, taking
distance from the “cronocracy”, or “the modern obsession for time, the incapability
to live without the clocks” tied up to the coercion of the time that produces reification
and alienation (Wulf, 1987). The beginnings of the Third Millennium have made this
anxiety even stronger, accompanied by an opposite shortage of work available to the
masses of the peoples of Western culture; this has created a “double-track” society,
where workers are requested to spend their time more and more on work, and in
egocentric activities promoted by social influences – and by web influencers -, while
jobless are unable to find their position and a functional role in society itself. “We
live in an age of haste, a «time without time» in which everything runs in an agitated
way, preventing us not only from living completely the present moments, but also to
from thinking serenely about what is happening around us. […] Legitimate son of
the acceleration of the history inaugurated by the Industrial Revolution and by the
French Revolution, the phenomenon of haste was promoted by the Illuminist passion
for the future as a place of realization of projects of emancipation and improvement;
our «postmodern» era, which has stopped believing in the future, has not ceased
to hurry, giving rise to a completely self-referential version of haste: a nihilistic
version, because it is emptied of universal emancipation projects and of the promises
of colonization of the future. In the context of the «eternalization of today», made
possible by the glacial desertification of the future determined by global capitalism,
the motto of contemporary man - I hasten, so I am - seems to be accompanied by an
absolute lack of awareness of the aims and destinations towards which to accelerate
the process of transcendence of the present” (Tagliapietra, 2010). On this relevant
theme many works – as the book Essere senza tempo by D. Fusaro, 2010 – point
out how the value of time - linked with an “economic” view of it, generated by
the capitalistic Western way of life – made of it, finally, a “good” to administrate
and multiply by haste: in this, the acceleration of work – Chaplin’s movie Modern
Times was eloquent, already in 1936 -, of life, and finally of history, has brought to a
schizophrenic and nihilistic run towards Nothing, where the spaces for a true “social
time”, to build real social relationship, are compressed, falsified or, even, cancelled.
In contrast, the well tested and traditional models seen in this short paper, spread
in many places and times, suggest for social cohesion an alternative pattern to the
one now accepted in the modern Western society: in our society the concept of “work
32 MARTINELLI

time” makes this aspect of life an economic capital, primarily invested by the single
individual in productive activities for himself (and therefore of an “isolationist” kind).
This implies that cohesion and social services must to be left to the functions of a
public or government agency, that for this function drain from the single individuals a
part of their financial capital, acquired by them with the use of their own time. In this
historic phase, where the successive global financial crises induce to re-modulate the
public resources used in the social sphere - and consequentially the work time in the
life of the people and in the society, with serious risks of dis-integration, inside the
Nations, for groups, as for individuals -, the rediscovery of highly effective, cohesive
forms of behaviour, shown by social systems with a reduced economic flow and an
elevated need of assistance, can suggest a road toward the future, that is possible to
build finding it in our very own past.
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 33

Figure 1. A recostruction model of the big hut in Luni sul Mignone.

Figure 2. Azande artisans

in Congo, working on
the handle of a multiple
“kpinga” throwing knife.
34 MARTINELLI

Figure 3. A moment of the

collective building of an Angal
hut in Uganda.

Figure 4. The deposition set

of the Grave “Monterozzi 3”
in the Arcatelle di Tarquinia
necropolis, second quarter of the
9th century B.C.
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 35

Figure 5. Feasting moments in Nias Island.

36 MARTINELLI

Figure 6. The erection of a big megalith in front of the omo sebua in Nias Island.
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 37

Figure 7. Bucchero Kyathos with gift inscription from Monteriggioni, half of the 7th century
B.C., Museo Guarnacci di Volterra.
Figure 8. Bucchero Kyathos with gift inscription from Caere, Tomb I of the S. Paul’s tumulus.
38 MARTINELLI
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 39

Figure 11. The finding of bone fragments in a tomb of the Pianacce necropolis of Sarteano,
in the 2010 excavations campaign

Front page:
Figure 9. A sharecropping farmer family of Frassineto, in the surroundings of Arezzo,
in the Thirties of ’900.
Figure 10. View on the Pianacce necropolis of Sarteano.
40 MARTINELLI

Figures 12-13. Some virtual recostructions of the outer and the inner part of the pottery
workshop of Petriolo in the surroundings of Clusium (pictures of the Author).
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 41

Figures 14-15. Some reconstructions of the long open building used as atelier in Murlo.
42 MARTINELLI

Figure 16. The round “theatrical” structure of the Pianacce necropolis in Sarteano, last
decades of the 6th century B.C.
ETHNOLOGICAL SOURCES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES ON WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC AREA 43

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