Villanovan

Early Iron Age people of the Po Valley, Etruria, and parts of Campania, Italy, c 900-700 BC. The culture is defined by artifacts from the type site of Villanova: metalwork in gold and bronze. The craftsmen played a major part in the development of the fibula and the technique of sheet metalwork, especially the situla. The cemeteries were urnfields with decorated biconical urns and bronze objects; subsidiary vessels, fibulae, ornaments, crescentic razors, etc., frequently accompanied the ashes. The pottery was handmade, dark burnished, decorated with meanders of grooved bands. The Villanovans were replaced culturally by the Etruscans in the south in the 8th century, in the north in the 6th century. This period laid the foundations for the Etruscan culture and city-states of the 8th century BC.

Early Iron Age culture of Etruria and the Po Plain of Italy, named after the site of Villanova, outside Bologna, dated to the 9th-8th centuries bc in Etruria, though lasting to the 6th century in the northern area. Villanovan remains are characterized by urnfield cemeteries containing decorated biconi-cal urns and well-developed bronze objects. These include articles of beaten bronze, often highly decorated, such as helmets, drinking vessels and situlae, as well as ornaments such as a great variety of fibulae. Villanovan settlements seem mostly to be of village status though lack of excavation makes it difficult to estimate when the onset of urban settlements occurred either in Etruria or in the Po plain. In any case there seems to have been much continuity, as Villanovan villages often underlie the towns of the Etruscan period (e.g. at Bologna and Veii). The Villanovans are often regarded as intruders in Italy, perhaps from central or eastern Europe, but there is little difficulty in seeing them as indigenous. Similarly, although traditional views saw the Etruscans as intruders who displaced the earlier Villanovans, current thinking favours the view that Etruscan culture emerged out of the Villanovan, through ‘orientalizing’ influences, brought about by trade and other peaceful contact.