Historical Culture In Iron Age Italy

"This book describes the historical culture of Italy from the Early Iron Age to the Roman conquest, covering a period from roughly 900 - 300 BCE. By historical culture, I refer throughout to a broader concept of social engagement with the past than is sometimes meant by the word "history." But this move permits us, following Sahlins' suggestion, to consider all kinds of new things. There exists a substantial corpus of material, much of it archaeological, some of it newly discovered, which speaks to us about how local communities in early Italy thought and talked about their history and how they articulated their past and present. This material has yet to have much impact on the typical ways in which we reconstruct the process of "becoming historical" in Italy. Instead, the story tends to be told almost exclusively from the Roman perspective and in a teleology"--

"This book describes the historical culture of Italy from the Early Iron Age to the Roman conquest, covering a period from roughly 900 - 300 BCE. By historical culture, I refer throughout to a broader concept of social engagement with the past than is sometimes meant by the word "history." But this move permits us, following Sahlins' suggestion, to consider all kinds of new things. There exists a substantial corpus of material, much of it archaeological, some of it newly discovered, which speaks to us about how local communities in early Italy thought and talked about their history and how they articulated their past and present. This material has yet to have much impact on the typical ways in which we reconstruct the process of "becoming historical" in Italy. Instead, the story tends to be told almost exclusively from the Roman perspective and in a teleology"--

The Etruscans have long fascinated scholars, artists, historians, and even the general public primarily due to their mysteriousness and the lack of information about them. These ancient peoples lived in Etruria, a region of Central Italy situated between the Arno and Tiber Rivers. Their civilization reached its height of wealth and power during the sixth century BCE. Their way of life, dress, religious beliefs, and so many more cultural elements would later be adopted and integrated by the Romans. They would come to dominate much of Europe, Asia Minor, and North Africa. The origins of the Etruscans have been a source of debate for centuries. Herodotus was the first to claim that they were the descendants of a group of people from Lydia in the Middle East, who their king had sent before relieving the pressures of an eighteen-year drought before 800 BCE. A few centuries later, another Greek historian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, would claim that the Etruscans were native to Etruria and the descendants of the Villanovan culture.

First published in 1926, Primitive Culture in Italy intends to determine to what extent there survived, in the ancient civilization with which it deals, any characteristic features of savage life and thought. The primitive man provides an ideal beginning to study the long upward progress of humanity. This book is not for the specialist, but for the general reader who wishes to know something of the beginnings of a great and notable civilization, the effects of which are still to be seen in our modern culture.

In A History of Earliest Italy, first published in 1984, Professor Pallottino illumines the wide variety of peoples, languages, and traditions of culture and trade that constituted the pre-Roman Italic world. Since the written sources are fragmentary, archaeology provides the central reservoir for evidence of the societies and institutions of the varied peoples of early Italy. This incisive and immensely readable account unfolds from the Bronze Age to the unification of the Italian peninsula and Sicily by Rome following the flourishing Archaic period. It examines the relationships among the peoples of the peninsula and the influence of Mycenae and Greece in trade and colonisation. In telling the story of the early stages of the eternal dialogue between national vocation and local diversity in Italy, Professor Pallottino demonstrates that it is no less deserving of our attention than its contemporary Greek and later imperial Roman counterparts.

The Etruscans have long fascinated scholars, artists, historians, and even the general public primarily due to their mysteriousness and the lack of information about them. These ancient peoples lived in Etruria, a region of Central Italy situated between the Arno and Tiber Rivers. Their civilization reached its height of wealth and power during the sixth century BCE. Their way of life, dress, religious beliefs, and so many more cultural elements would later be adopted and integrated by the Romans. They would come to dominate much of Europe, Asia Minor, and North Africa. The origins of the Etruscans have been a source of debate for centuries. Herodotus was the first to claim that they were the descendants of a group of people from Lydia in the Middle East, who their king had sent before relieving the pressures of an eighteen-year drought before 800 BCE. A few centuries later, another Greek historian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, would claim that the Etruscans were native to Etruria and the descendants of the Villanovan culture.

This innovative book uses social network analysis to trace the origins of pre-Roman Italian peoples from their earliest exchange networks.

How should we understand the ways in which the regions of Italy were affected by Roman imperialism? This book, which is the first full-scale treatment of ancient Umbria in any language, takes a balanced view of the region's history in the first millennium BC, focusing on local actions and motivations as much as the effect of outside influences and Roman policies. Through a careful reading of all the types of evidence it provides an important challenge to traditional treatments emphasising the 'Romanization' of the region, arguing that this is a poor explanation for the complexity of local societies in the late Republican period. Instead it proposes that other trends, particularly the organization of states, help to explain the fascinating plurality of identities that are evident in the imperial period and allow us to appreciate the diversity of local societies that emerged in both mountain and lowland areas of Umbria.