At the turn of the 20th century Phoebe A. Hearst set out to bring Etruscan antiquities to UC Berkeley for the educational benefit of students, faculty, and the public at large. Some 4,000 Etruscan artifacts (the largest collection in the US) arrived on campus in 1902. Since then, the artifacts have never been studied or analyzed as a whole, nor have they been put on exhibition or made available to students. This class, the first of its kind, will immerse students into a collection that has been largely ignored. It will offer a brief introduction to the Etruscans with special emphasis on the history of the Etruscan collection at the Hearst. The class, which will be held in the Hearst Museum, will be organized both chronologically and thematically, proceeding by means of object-based analyses combined with new approaches to contextualizing the material culture of the Etruscans. Working from the objects themselves, we will address various aspects of Etruscan life: banqueting, the home, religious life, the public realm, personal adornment, political authority in the hopes of fleshing out the funerary biographies found in tombs.  

This course fulfills the following Major requirements: Geographical area (A) and Chronological period (I), based on the topic of the final research paper or project.