Archaeology in the Rome area means ancient Etruscans and Romans. As neighbors, their histories were entwined, Etruscans ruling Rome and influencing Roman culture, then Rome conquering and absorbing Etruria into the Roman State and the Etruscans into Roman civilization. This brief 5-day tour will be an introduction to the Etruscan and Roman civilizations.

The Etruscans were the first civilization native to ancient Italy and a dominant power on the peninsula for some 300 years, during part of which time Etruscan kings ruled Rome and bestowed on it the attributes of a city. The Etruscans have been regarded as a mysterious people, a misleading label, because most of the mysteriousness is simply a product of the paucity of information that archaeologists and historians have been able to wrest from very meager sources. The purpose of this brief tour is to discover a little known and much misunderstood people.

The Romans fashioned the ancient world's greatest Empire and an advanced civilization. The Roman Empire stretched from Scotland in the west to Syria in the east and from Germany in the North to North Africa in the south and encompassed a vast array of differing peoples that the Romans, with their genius for organization, melded into a single entity by urbanizing each conquered people in turn.


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