This comprehensive survey of Etruscan civilization, from its origin in the Villanovan Iron Age in the ninth century B.C. to its absorption by Rome in the first century B.C., combines well-known aspects of the Etruscan world with new discoveries and fresh insights into the role of women in Etruscan society. In addition, the Etruscans are contrasted to the Greeks, whom they often emulated, and to the Romans, who at once admired and disdained them. The result is a compelling and complete picture of a people and a culture. This in-depth examination of Etruria examines how differing access to mineral wealth, trade routes, and agricultural land led to distinct regional variations. Heavily illustrated with ancient Etruscan art and cultural objects, the text is organized both chronologically and thematically, interweaving archaeological evidence, analysis of social structure, descriptions of trade and burial customs, and an examination of pottery and works of art.

During the last millennium B.C., before the coming of the Romans, the Etruscans built a thriving civilization in the western Mediterranean basin, which was rich in natural resources. From the eighth century B.C., Etruria became a destination on the Italian peninsula for refined works by artisans of the Hellenic regions, the Near East, and central Europe, and for masters from these regions, who emigrated and began to work for the local clientele. These artisans would contribute significantly to the development of an art that was recognizably Etruscan. The influence of Etruscan civilization on other cultures has received less attention from archaeologists than has the effect of the Eastern and Greek worlds on Etruscan culture. This lavishly illustrated volume seeks to redress this imbalance by tracing the Etruscans' impact beyond Etruria. It focuses on the panorama of their commerce and the Etruscan ideological and cultural initiatives that radiated from their native territory into other regions. Etruscan civilization spread across a surprisingly vast area, from ancient Italy out into the Mediterranean basin and continental Europe. The book devotes new attention to details that vary from region to region, with a number of chapters devoted to regional specialists. They offer fresh perspectives on the history, art, and political organization of a culture that, in many ways, remains mysterious.

The Etruscans can be shown to have made significant, and in some cases perhaps the first, technical advances in the central and northern Mediterranean. To the Etruscan people we can attribute such developments as the tie-beam truss in large wooden structures, surveying and engineering drainage and water tunnels, the development of the foresail for fast long-distance sailing vessels, fine techniques of metal production and other pyrotechnology, post-mortem C-sections in medicine, and more. In art, many technical and iconographic developments, although they certainly happened first in Greece or the Near East, are first seen in extant Etruscan works, preserved in the lavish tombs and goods of Etruscan aristocrats. These include early portraiture, the first full-length painted portrait, the first perspective view of a human figure in monumental art, specialized techniques of bronze-casting, and reduction-fired pottery (the bucchero phenomenon). Etruscan contacts, through trade, treaty and intermarriage, linked their culture with Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily, with the Italic tribes of the peninsula, and with the Near Eastern kingdoms, Greece and the Greek colonial world, Iberia, Gaul and the Punic network of North Africa, and influenced the cultures of northern Europe. In the past fifteen years striking advances have been made in scholarship and research techniques for Etruscan Studies. Archaeological and scientific discoveries have changed our picture of the Etruscans and furnished us with new, specialized information. Thanks to the work of dozens of international scholars, it is now possible to discuss topics of interest that could never before be researched, such as Etruscan mining and metallurgy, textile production, foods and agriculture. In this volume, over 60 experts provide insights into all these aspects of Etruscan culture, and more, with many contributions available in English for the first time to allow the reader access to research that may not otherwise be available to them. Lavishly illustrated, The Etruscan World brings to life the culture and material past of the Etruscans and highlights key points of development in research, making it essential reading for researchers, academics and students of this fascinating civilization.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains ... "all relevant illustrations from the book, arranged in alphabetical order according to mythological character. To increase the usefulness of the [CD-ROM], supplementary images not in the book have been added[.]"--P. xv.

This timely volume embraces and interprets the increasingly broad and deep canon of life narratives by African Americans. The contributors discover and recover neglected lives, texts, and genres, enlarge the wide range of critical methods used by scholars to study these works, and expand the understanding of autobiography to encompass photography, comics, blogs, and other modes of self-expression. This book also examines at length the proliferation of African American autobiography in the twenty-first century, noting the roles of digital genres, remediated lives, celebrity lives, self-help culture, non-Western religious traditions, and the politics of adoption. The life narratives studied range from an eighteenth-century criminal narrative, a 1918 autobiography, and the works of Richard Wright to new media, graphic novels, and a celebrity memoir from Pam Grier."