Ritual and Ideology in Early Iron Age Crete: The Role of the Past and the East

This chapter examines cemeteries to investigate the complex dynamics of ethnogenesis and the construction of collective identity and elite group ideologies in central Italy during the Early Iron Age (EIA) and the so-called Orientalizing period. It overviews dynamics of interaction between Etruscans, Greeks, Phoenicians, and other people from the East in the Tyrrhenian context. The chapter investigates the notion of symbolic violence as proposed by Bourdieu and Godelier as a central aspect of collective group as well as individual strategies, and of power rituals in the EIA and the Orientalizing period in Etruria. As the funerary ideology of the Etruscan EIA recalls a picture of sociopolitical dialectics between collective trends and specific group or individual features and between conservatism and innovation in constant interplay with the criteria of status, gender, and age, there is no shortage of ambiguities and differences. Hut-shaped urns are of crucial importance for understanding the socio-ritual and gender dialectics, even if they are relatively uncommon.