Grape Pips, Dog Bones and Acorn Missiles

The Etruscan settlement at La Piana came to a violent end. Every year excavations at the site, near the Italian city of Siena, turn up new evidence that La Piana was attacked and destroyed toward the end of the third century B.C. The invaders flung golfball-size missiles through the walls of the Etruscan buildings; they stormed the settlement and hacked some of its inhabitants to death; and they set the village aflame, baking its mud walls in a great inferno.

Death and the Etruscans: It seems that these images have always been married in our minds. In the 1840s, for instance, the young explorer George Dennis traveled around modern Tuscany, the site of ancient Etruria, exposing himself to bandits, poisonous snakes and malarial swamps. He found the Etruscan sites themselves equally ominous: They were “ever wrapt in gloom …teeming with solemn memorials of a past, mysterious race.” Dennis concluded that the history of Etruria is written “in her sepulchres” and “on the painted walls of her tombs.”