In the field of European recent prehistory it is generally agreed that, from the Early Orientalising period, Etruria played a central role in long distance trade, also acting as a link between the Aegean and east Mediterranean and trans-Alpine Europe. A widely acknowledged implication is that this primary status of the Etruscans among the indigenous peoples of Italy was a secondary effect of the Greek and Phoenician colonisation in the central Mediterranean. It is the aim of this paper to show that, as early as the Late Bronze Age, Etruria emerged as a complex territorial, political, and economic entity and was able to participate in an interregional network of trade reaching as far as northern Germany and the Aegean. By the beginnings of the Italian Iron Age, this region was organised as a federation of early states, with important extensions in the southern Po plain, along the Adriatic coast, and in Campania.