Etruscans Now
Cultural identity
Click here to return to list of papers
Daphne Nash Briggs - Institute of Archaeology, Oxford
Invisible trade: sea piracy and land-based slave trade in the history of Villanovan and Etruscan Italy and France from the ninth to the fifth centuries BC.
Etruscan trade in metalwork, wine, and sundry manufactures is familiar from finds across Mediterranean and Continental Europe (e.g. G. Camporeale, Gli Etruschi fuori d'Etruria, 2001). Organized links with Villanovan and Etruscan Italy (not with Massalia, unimportant in this respect) sustained the HaD and LTA Celtic elites in France (as I suggested in Nash 1985, "Celtic territorial expansion and the Mediterranean world"). Trade simply in raw materials cannot explain this phenomenon, especially in northern France: slave procurement must be factored in. Etruscan piracy and slave dealing are widely acnowledged, usually in passing, but their historical signficance for both Etruria and Central Europe has been severely underplayed. I propose to look into them in some detail.