Extirpations in Etruria: Missing Lynxes and the Missing Link between Material Cultural and Ecological Knowledge (20 min)

Presenters

Meryl Shriver-Rice, University of Miami, Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy

Abstract

The epistemological background of Etruscan archaeology has historically downplayed the importance of environmental archaeology, in particular human relationships to plants and human-animal relationships beyond animal husbandry and agricultural pursuits. When art depicting animals have been labeled and described in site reports and further analyses, the animal depicted is often considered as a motif symbolic of something other than the animal itself or is described as merely decorative. It is not often considered as a part of the sociocultural embeddedness of humans within their landscape. This is particularly true for felines in Etruscan art. While most feline depictions have been attributed to the genus Panthera (tigers, lions, jaguars, and leopards), the closest lions and other big cats from Panthera’s natural ranges were hundreds or thousands of miles away. And while it is true that Etruscans traveled widely and might have encountered these large cats, it is more plausible that “charismatic megafauna” such as large felines native to their own landscape would have held high cultural significance. The largest feline native to the area and likely inspiration for at least part of the visual culture of Etruria is the until-recently extirpated Tuscan lynx, a subpopulation of the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx). This disconnect between material cultural studies and ecological knowledge of extirpations represents another way in which environmental archaeological perspectives can inform material culture studies and vice versa. The current zooarchaeological record is still heavily fragmented and cannot speak to the biodiversity of the landscape of ancient Etruria. For this data, ecological studies can help to fill in the gaps. In this paper, I employ an interdisciplinary environmental lens drawing on foundational ethological and ecological data to investigate how the lynx may be better recognized within Etruscan visual culture and cosmology.

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