Introduction

Although we can detect a long process of social differentiation through Iron Age burial ritual, it remains doubtless that new ways of articulating such differentiation become evident at the end of the eighth century, and through the seventh century, with escalating higher quantities and quality of grave-goods and their deposition through ever-more complex sophisticated ritual performances and types of burials. Although becoming visible through Iron Age burial ritual, only at the end of the eighth century did elite groups choose to create and then exploit an Orientalising material culture that enabled them to articulate political authority through a new funerary ideology. This ideology was expressed in new modes of burial ritual at the multidepositional tomb: the ideology of the warrior, which had been materialised in Early Iron Age burial ritual through the use of funerary symbols such as the helmet-shaped lid and weapons, merged with a household ideology that made the house and its related aspects, the family group and landownership, the fulcrum of a discourse on political power in death.

As I discuss in detail in Chapter IV, this new funerary ideology stemmed from the earlier Iron Age funerary symbolism that I briefly analyse in the previous chapter, but was articulated through new symbols, which an Orientalising material culture afforded. The end of the eighth century and the seventh century therefore mark an important transition towards the expression of a new political authority in death, but this, I argue, was not of a monarchic or princely nature. In the first part of this chapter, I would like to defend this contention and challenge current views on the princely character of Orientalising Etruria. I suggest that these views rely on an orientalist and colonialist approach to the Orientalising ‘phenomenon’ or ‘movement’ and that this approach has subsequently influenced the interpretation of Late Iron Age high-status warrior burials, which are often defined as princely.