Pre-Roman cities and religion between Etruria and Iberia

Corinna Riva (UCL; BSR)

In collaboration with the Institute of Classical Studies.

What do 1st-millennium-BC southern Tyrrhenian Etruscan and South Eastern Iberian cities have in common? And why are they good to think with comparatively?

Scholarship on pre-Roman cities across the Mediterranean has long recognised the close relationship between urbanism and religion, especially acknowledging parallel trajectories among cities of similar size and political formation. As the lion’s share of attention has gone to large metropolitan agglomerations that are often characterised by the monumentalisation of sanctuaries, not enough consideration has been devoted to smaller cities where religion played just as significant a role as it did elsewhere. A comparative approach, which tackles this urban-sacred relationship towards cities, big and small, might help shed light upon the urban character of religious worship.

Corinna Riva is Associate Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Her interests are on Etruscan Italy and, more broadly, 1st-millennium-BC urbanism in the non-Greco-Roman Mediterranean. She is the author of The Urbanisation of Etruria. Funerary Practices and Social Change, 700-600 BC (2010, Cambridge) and of A Short History of the Etruscans (2020, Bloomsbury).