UC Berkeley displays 2,500-year-old Etruscan artifacts for first time in 125 years

The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley holds the largest collection of Etruscan artifacts in the United States, acquired around the turn of the 20th century through the patronage of Phoebe Hearst and her antiquities adviser Alfred Emerson. For roughly 125 years, the items — including small statues, pottery, jewelry, and about 800 terracotta votives from the sanctuary at ancient Caere — remained in storage.

A pop-up exhibition titled "The Etruscans Unopened" opened in the Bernice Layne Brown Gallery of Doe Library and runs through August 31. It marks the first public display of these objects since their arrival on campus. Art historian and archaeologist Lisa Pieraccini co-curated the exhibit with art librarian Lynn Cunningham and students from her 2025 seminar, "The Etruscans: Pasts, Present and Futures." A companion exhibit at the Hearst Museum was co-curated by students from her fall 2025 seminar, "Etruscans in the Museum."

The Etruscans populated much of Italy some 2,500 years ago and contributed innovations later attributed to the Romans, including the numbering system behind Roman numerals, the arch, advanced hydraulic engineering, and cultural elements such as the toga and the roots of the English words "person" and "arena." Their written records — poetry, prose, and histories — were largely destroyed after Roman conquest, and their non-Indo-European language was long labeled "mysterious" by scholars.

Pieraccini argues the Etruscans are not mysterious but understudied, noting that American and European academia historically centered on Greco-Roman empires. The votives on display, many mold-made terracotta figures of seated women nursing infants, were left at temples as offerings to female divinities associated with fertility and childbirth. Traces of faded paint and tiny fingerprints from ancient workshop production remain visible on some pieces.

Student involvement was central to the project. Pieraccini described the collection as a humanities laboratory, saying biology and astrophysics majors reported the curation work as a highlight of their undergraduate careers. Students researched artifacts and wrote museum labels, learning to convey significance concisely.

The campus exhibits complement a larger Etruscan exhibition at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, running through September 20, which Pieraccini consulted on for a decade. That show brings together objects from 30 international museums, including loans from the Hearst Museum, in what she calls the most formidable Etruscan exhibition to open in the U.S.