Dissecting a discovery

The first report of the Tarquinia burial was that of Rosella Lorenzi (Reference Lorenzi2013) from Discovery News, who broke the story on 20 September 2013. She described “the skeletonised body of an Etruscan prince” and went on to provide details of the grave goods: “a spear lay along the body, while fibulae, or brooches, along the chest indicated that the individual, a man, was probably once dressed in a mantle”. At this point, the artefacts from the tomb had not even been excavated—yet the trope that would define this discovery had already been passed on to the press by archaeologists. A burial including a weapon, particularly one located so close to the corpse, simply had to be male. The next day, 21 September 2013, the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera was the source of the first print publication of the story, stating that the tomb contained ‘the skeleton of an Etruscan prince’ whom unnamed ‘scholars’ considered may have been related to the mytho-historical figure of Demar-atus (Gasperetti Reference Gasperetti2013a). The article was followed up the next day, when a bronze grater excavated from the tomb was discussed in terms of the preparation of ‘vino all’eroica’, wine in the style of heroes (Gasperetti Reference Gasperetti2013b). English-language news media quickly picked up on the story, with the UK publication The Daily Telegraph titling their article of 23 September “Italian archaeologists hail discovery of warrior prince's tomb” (Squires Reference Squires2013). A multitude of similar articles followed, in traditional newspapers, online archaeology news outlets and individual blogs.

In each re-telling of the tale, the assumption of the archaeologists—that the tomb was primarily that of a male due to the presence of a spear lying on the funeral bench beside the inhumation burial—was repeated. There was remarkable consistency among the reports and their identification of the same interpretative tropes—the burial accompanied by a weapon was that of a warrior, potentially related to both valorised Greek immigrants and an Etruscan royal family. It is unclear where these statements describing the buried individual as ‘royal’ and ‘male’ originated. We know that Mandolesi specified carefully that the burial is that of an ‘upper class’ individual. Nonetheless, the multiple, almost identical accounts that attribute masculinity and royalty to the individual had the effect of magnifying the original interpretations, repeating, uncritically, an already uncritical observation on the gender of the skeleton.

From prince to princess

It seems uncharitable to criticise the ideas of Mandolesi (as excavation director) and his colleagues at this point—this is, after all, the practice of interpretation at the trowel's edge (Hodder Reference Hodder1999: xi). Similarly, the act of involving the media at an early stage of excavation is surely to be applauded, providing an opportunity to share archaeological discoveries with the public as soon as possible. Yet this interpretation exposed underlying androcentric practices in Etruscan archaeology. The instant reporting of modern media created a paper trail for the entrenched attitudes that remain at the heart of Etruscan studies—statements to journalists could not be unsaid in the wake of more detailed study. For the story of the Etruscan ‘prince’ did not end with the excavation itself, or the unveiling of the grave goods. It ended with the revelation that an osteoarchaeological study of the remains had proved that they were female.

Echoing the reports of the original discovery, this new realisation was reported not through peer-reviewed academic channels, but through news media. A local news outlet, Viterbo News, reported on the osteoarchaeological analysis on 26 September, mere days after the burials were removed from the tomb (Pinna Reference Pinna2013). Journalist Alessandra Pinna described the realisation of Mandolesi and his team that “[the tomb] originally attributed to a male, probably a warrior prince, in reality contained the remains of a woman between the ages of 35 and 40”. The cremation burial was revealed to be that of a man, which solved the potentially embarrassing problem created by the spear. Pinna (Reference Pinna2013) quotes Mandolesi's thoughts on the new role of the spear, beginning with an apologetic statement of error and ending with a new interpretation for the burials:

Just as the original Italian language story was picked up by English language news sources, so too was the updated interpretation of the tomb. However, the media that chose to engage with this second phase of the story were not the same as the prestigious print media who had originally picked it up. They were primarily online articles, developed from a single LiveScience post (Ghose Reference Ghose2013a), reprinted by the Huffington Post (Ghose Reference Ghose2013b) and CBS News (Ghose Reference Ghose2013c). Even these digital media channels were late to pick up the new information—they appeared almost a month after the amendments were reported by Viterbo News, around 20 October. Print newspapers were entirely uninterested in the new developments—with neither Corriere della Sera nor The Telegraph devoting column space to the updated information—and no amendments were added to the original online report of Discovery News that broke the story (as of February 2014). Perhaps the drama of the discovery had been the initial spur for the frenzy of media interest surrounding the original find, and the local news story of a dusty bone report did not make for a compelling by-line. Yet of the media that chose to take up the osteological report, not one was critical of the archaeologists’ original assumptions about the gender of the body. Indeed, they repeated Mandolesi's new explanation, transferring the royal status of the ‘warrior prince’ onto what was now termed a ‘princess’.

Androcentric assumptions exposed

The dramatic reversal in the opinions of the excavation team as to the gender of the inhumation burial from Tarquinia provides a window into the sub-discipline of Etruscan archaeology. The statements made by a leading scholar in the field, one of the most respected individuals in Italophone Etruscan archaeology, exposed the lack of engagement and deliberate avoidance of archaeological theory in the sub-discipline. The large body of work by many, largely female, scholars on the complexities of gender in pre-Roman Italy, summarised by Whitehouse (Reference Whitehouse2001) and typified by the papers collected in Whitehouse (Reference Whitehouse1998) and Herring and Lomas (2009), was entirely ignored. While the original statements and implications regarding the position of the spear and the gender of the individual buried with it are understandable in the rush of discovery and the desire to share information with an agog media, the follow-up interpretation is deeply dissatisfying, and bears comparison to other examples of confused reassessments when gender stereotypes are challenged by archaeological evidence.

The most famous example of this practice is that of the incredibly rich female burial discovered at Vix, in northern France. Arnold (Reference Arnold, Walde and Willows1991, Reference Arnold1995, Reference Arnold2001) has catalogued the series of interpretative contortions required to negotiate the presence of a female in a high-status grave that is suggestive of political power. Spindler's (Reference Spindler1983: fig. 82) now infamous depiction of the woman as a transvestite male priest was the height of these attempts to reconcile osteological evidence with androcentric preconceptions. Later interpretations have focused on the appearance and accoutrements of the woman buried at Vix to argue that she should be considered exceptional—equated to a male, or differentiated by her ritual status (Knüsel Reference Knüsel2002). Pope and Ralston (Reference Pope, Ralston, Moore and Armada2011) have critiqued the continued avoidance of female power in archaeological interpretations of the British Iron Age. They particularly note the different approaches taken to jewellery in burials based on the sex of the skeletal remains the objects were found with. If the body is male, the object becomes connected to narratives of inherited rank and political power, while female jewellery is exclusively linked to marital and reproductive status (James Reference James1993: 65, cited by Pope & Ralston Reference Pope, Ralston, Moore and Armada2011: 377). This retrospective fitting of an androcentric interpretation onto the ‘correct’ kind of body is exactly the same kind of revisionist practice visible in the re-evaluation of the spear at Tarquinia, in spite of evidence from within Italy of more complex representations of women in the tomb.

Although Toms (Reference Toms and Whitehouse1998: 166) has demonstrated the presence of two different sets of artefacts that may be relatively reliably linked with gender in the earlier Villanovan necropoleis of Tarquinia, she notes exceptions. Hencken's (Reference Hencken1968: 431) comment on Etruscan women and their need for razors illustrates that exceptional female burials were already notable during the 1960s. Bonfante (Reference Bonfante, Herring and Lomas2009: 109) argues that many of the so-called ‘princely’ burials from the eighth century BC at Tarquinia and Cerveteri may have belonged to women. In many more analyses of gender and grave goods at cemeteries in Etruria and Latium Vetus (Bartolini & Grotanelli Reference Bartolini, Grotanelli and Rallo1989; Winther Reference Winther, Andersen, Houby-Nielsen and Rathje1997; Rathje Reference Rathje, Ridgway, Serra-Ridgway, Pearce, Herring, Whitehouse and Wilkins2000; Cougle Reference Cougle, Herring and Lomas2009), exceptional females have been identified—individuals buried with a mixture of supposedly female (weaving tools and jewellery) and male (weaponry and armour) items. In every case, the same interpretation put forward by Mandolesi has been suggested—that the items are a reference to a male relative of the deceased female, a practice observed and critiqued by Izzet (Reference Izzet2007: 120) and Kreindler (Reference Kreindler2012). However, with even this adapted interpretation, only circulated to a much reduced following, the original inaccurate and androcentric view will be the only one to make an impression on many members of the general public.