THEORY

   Etruscan archaeology has been traditionally most closely related to classical archaeology, which explicitly denies the presence of theoretical approaches. In actual fact, Etruscan archaeology has employed both implicit and more explicit theory, including most notably those based on the approaches of John Beazley and Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli. The former developed a methodology, based on the theories of Giovanni Morelli and Bernard Berenson, toward identifying hands in Etruscan art. The latter was more versed in a Marxist background and therefore was also conscious of sociopolitical context. More recently, senior Etruscan scholars such as Mario Torelli, Francoise-Helene Pairault Massa, and Mauro Cristofani have introduced important sociopolitical discourse, in part based on the Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli tradition, but also drawing on anthropology. A separate group of scholars from the University of Rome studying protohistory (equally within a broadly Marxist framework) have also developed important contacts with the theoretical outlooks of Anglo-American anthropological prehistorians. Scholars such as Renato Peroni, Anna Maria Bietti-Sestieri, Alessandro Guidi, Francesco di Gennaro, Marco Pacciarelli, and Cristiano Iaia, while retaining a good knowledge of material culture, have branched out into studies of landscape and burial analysis. In the more recent generation, younger scholars such as Gabriele Cifani, Alessandro Naso, Marco Rendeli, Andrea Zifferero, and (based in the British tradition) Vedia Izzet, Ulla Rajala, and Corinna Riva, have also taken a more theoretical approach to material culture, the built environment, burial, and landscape, drawing on postcolonial theory and modern concepts such as identity, the body, and hybridity.