The Evolution of Etruscan Culture in Central Italy

The Etruscan language doesn't belong to the Indo-European family, and it was probably derived from languages that had been spoken in Italy since the Neolithic. The only concrete evidence tying the Etruscans to the east is the presence of Lemneon on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean around 600 BC. In the last few decades of the 10th century BC, for reasons that we still don't entirely understand, the people living in what would become Etruria largely abandoned their dispersed villages throughout the countryside. They moved en masse to high plateaus of volcanic rock and rebuilt their separate villages in these new locations. These weren't quite cities, not yet