The dominant mode of funerary rite in central Italy during the Bronze Age and early Iron Age, where the body was burned on a funerary pyre. A number of sophisticated studies have been able to separate this ceremony into a series of phases of the rite of passage, separating those items that were burned from those that were not. This rite (or variation of it) was retained in the cities of northern Etruria (e.g., Volterra, Chiusi, Perugia), whereas inhumation took over as the dominant rite in many of the southern cities such as Caere or Tarquinia.
Section showing cremation burials at Veii.
Historical Dictionary of the Etruscans. Simon K. F. Stoddart.