Fleshing out the demography of Etruria Geof Kron Forthcoming in Jean Macintosh Turfa (ed.), The Etruscan World (London-New York: Routledge, December 2012) The analysis of skeletal remains offers extremely important evidence for health, nutrition, and changes in economic development and social equality, particularly for poorly documented civilizations, such as that of the Etruscans. Interpreting Etruscan physical anthropology is difficult, and we can only give a brief and tentative preliminary sketch at this stage of research, given the limited number of comprehensive anthropometric studies using the best methods, nevertheless, enough evidence exists to suggest that the Etruscans enjoyed an overall level of health and nutrition notably superior to that of the working classes of 19th century Europe. This is true for most Greco-Roman populations from the late Archaic and Classical periods, through the Roman republic and empire (Kron 2005), but the Etruscan diet, like that of many Classical and Hellenistic Greeks (Kron 2005: 72), seems, for the most part, to have been perceptibly better than that of the population of later Roman Italy. Classical archaeologists have traditionally concentrated relatively little upon the techniques of the 'New Archaeology,' most importantly for our purposes, the exploitation of zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, and physical anthropology when excavating in Italy (see MacKinnon 2007 for an overview). Etruscan archaeology, however, was a relatively early and significant exception to this general rule. The controversy, which dates from Classical times and the competing accounts of Herodotus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, over the extent of Eastern Aegean or Near Eastern influence on the origins of Etruscan culture inspired Italian physical anthropologists, dating back at least as far as the 1880s (Coppa et al. 1997: 99 note 2), with an intense interest in determining the relationship between the 'ethnicity' or 'race' of this enigmatic people, and that of the other cultural groups in Iron Age, Roman, and modern Italy (see Ward-Perkins 1959, Perkins 2009 for two eminently sensible accounts). This obsession on the part of physical anthropologists with identifying ethnic groups, which owed much to the influence upon early anthropometric research of eugenics and social Darwinism, continues to channel