As for Livy: it isn't like the Romans had a really high opinion of their early kings, so I wouldn't take him as an unbiased source when he tells us Tullia drove a chariot over her father.
I agree that it's scholarly thin ice to posit Etruscan society as some kind of feminist utopia based on a single burial and I am well aware that almost everything we can read about the Etruscans comes filtered through sources with their own varying reasons for emphasizing, minimizing, appropriating, or defaming aspects of their culture—I trust tomb paintings which depict women as participants in banquets and spectators at games much more than I do the Greek or Roman interpretations of these scenes, because it's the trouble-in-River-City model: Etruscan women dine with their men? TOTAL SLUTS I AM TELLING YOU THEY DO IT RIGHT ON THE DINING ROOM FLOOR. (Plus those sarcophagi with the couples in bed with each other. Those people don't stop boning even after they're dead.) I don't have a problem assuming that the woman in this instance was buried with the spear because it had some significance to her rather than to the other person in the tomb. I don't know what that significance was. I don't need it to mean that she was the ass-kicking warrior princess of seventh-century Tarchna, awesomely entertaining as that would be. I just hit that line cited by the article's author—"La lancia, con molta probabilità, era stata posta come simbolo di unione tra i due defunti"—and thought suddenly of How to Suppress Women's Writing: "She wasn't buried with a spear. She was buried with a spear, but it belonged to her husband. She was buried with a spear, but it was symbolic of her marriage . . ."
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I agree that it's scholarly thin ice to posit Etruscan society as some kind of feminist utopia based on a single burial and I am well aware that almost everything we can read about the Etruscans comes filtered through sources with their own varying reasons for emphasizing, minimizing, appropriating, or defaming aspects of their culture—I trust tomb paintings which depict women as participants in banquets and spectators at games much more than I do the Greek or Roman interpretations of these scenes, because it's the trouble-in-River-City model: Etruscan women dine with their men? TOTAL SLUTS I AM TELLING YOU THEY DO IT RIGHT ON THE DINING ROOM FLOOR. (Plus those sarcophagi with the couples in bed with each other. Those people don't stop boning even after they're dead.) I don't have a problem assuming that the woman in this instance was buried with the spear because it had some significance to her rather than to the other person in the tomb. I don't know what that significance was. I don't need it to mean that she was the ass-kicking warrior princess of seventh-century Tarchna, awesomely entertaining as that would be. I just hit that line cited by the article's author—"La lancia, con molta probabilità, era stata posta come simbolo di unione tra i due defunti"—and thought suddenly of How to Suppress Women's Writing: "She wasn't buried with a spear. She was buried with a spear, but it belonged to her husband. She was buried with a spear, but it was symbolic of her marriage . . ."