Live in villages, plow fields before cities: aspects of the primary economy of the communities of Southern Etruria between the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age

The aim of this PhD research was to investigate in a new light the settlement dynamics of human communities in Southern Etruria between 1150 and 850 BC. The hypothesis is that the changes that took place in the primary economy, specifically regarding the agro-pastoral exploitation of the territory, played a key role in the phenomenon of the Protourban Turn: the transition from the village communities of the Final Bronze Age to the first urban centers of the early Iron Age. To verify this assumption, a series of landscape archeological and land evaluation techniques were applied to the territory of Southern Etruria in order to reconstruct the degree of suitability of the landscape for agro-pastoral exploitation. To apply these techniques efficiently and render the analyses replicable, a digital predictive model of the landscape and a tool for the ArcGIS software were created, capable of calculating, for the area pertaining to each settlement: 1) the extent of woods, pastures and cultivated fields; 2) the annual food production of both vegetable and animal origin; 3) the maximum sustainable size of the population. Through these data, the socio-political models proposed up to now in the literature have been tested, confirming, and enriching them.