ABSTRACT

The analysis of skeletal remains offers extremely important evidence for health, nutrition and changes in economic development and social equality, particularly for poorly documented civilizations, such as that of the Etruscans. Interpreting Etruscan physical anthropology is dif cult, and we can only give a brief and tentative preliminary sketch at this stage of research, given the limited number of comprehensive anthropometric studies using the best methods; nevertheless, enough evidence exists to suggest that the Etruscans enjoyed an overall level of health and nutrition notably superior to that of the working classes of nineteenth-century Europe. This is true for most Greco-Roman populations from the late Archaic and Classical periods through the Roman republic and empire (Kron 2005), but the Etruscan diet, like that of many Classical and Hellenistic Greeks (Kron 2005: 72), seems, for the most part, to have been perceptibly better than that of the population of later Roman Italy.