The Italic People Of Ancient Apulia

This book makes recent scholarship on the Italic people of fourth-century BC Apulia available to English-speaking audiences.

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

Although there are many studies of certain individual ancient Italic groups (e.g. the Etruscans, Gauls and Latins), there is no work that takes a comprehensive view of each of them—the famous and the less well-known—that existed in Iron Age and Roman Italy. Moreover, many previous studies have focused only on the material evidence for these groups or on what the literary sources have to say about them. This handbook is conceived of as a resource for archaeologists, historians, philologists and other scholars interested in finding out more about Italic groups from the earliest period they are detectable (early Iron Age, in most instances), down to the time when they begin to assimilate into the Roman state (in the late Republican or early Imperial period). As such, it will endeavor to include both archaeological and historical perspectives on each group, with contributions from the best-known or up-and-coming archaeologists and historians for these peoples and topics. The language of the volume is English, but scholars from around the world have contributed to it. This volume covers the ancient peoples of Italy more comprehensively in individual chapters, and it is also distinct because it has a thematic section.

"The Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe" surveys the major religious currents of Europe before Christianity - the first continental religion with hegemonic ambition - wiped out most local religions. The evidence - whether archaeological or written - is notoriously difficult to interpret, and the variety of religions documented by the sources and the range of languages used are bewildering. The "Handbook" brings together leading authorities on pre-Christian religious history to provide a state-of-the-art survey. The first section of the book covers the Prehistoric period, from the Paleolithic to the Bronze Age. The second section covers the period since writing systems began. Ranging across the Mediterranean and Northern, Celtic and Slavic Europe, the essays assess the archaeological and textual evidence. Dispersed archaeological remains and biased outside sources constitute our main sources of information, so the complex task of interpreting these traces is explained for each case. The "Handbook" also aims to highlight the plurality of religion in ancient Europe: the many ways in which it is expressed, notably in discourse, action, organization, and material culture; how it is produced and maintained by different people with different interests; how communities always connect with or disassociate from adjunct communities and how their beliefs and rituals are shaped by these relationships. The "Handbook" will be invaluable to anyone interested in ancient History and also to scholars and students of Religion, Anthropology, Archaeology, and Classical Studies.

"A remarkable book,in which Forsythe uses his thorough knowledge of the ancient evidence to reconstruct a coherent and eminently plausible picture which in turn illuminates early Roman society more immediately than any other category of evidence is able to do. Forsythe displays his impressive ability to demonstrate to what extent and why the tradition that dominates the extant historical narratives is not credible."—Kurt Raaflaub, author of The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece "An excellent synthetic treatment of early Roman history found in both modern literary and archaeological materials."—Richard Mitchell, author of Patricians and Plebeians

Most of the previous scholarship on Apulian red-figure pottery has focused on the cataloguing of collections, the attribution of vases to painters and workshops, iconographic and stylistic matters, and individual vessels and vase forms. This partly reflects the history of vase-painting scholarship, which grew out of antiquarian collecting during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the fact that a full archaeological provenance is not preserved for the overwhelming majority of vessels. This book takes a different approach by using a database containing in excess of 13,500 vessels and fragments to identify patterns in the production and decoration of Apulian vases that cast light on the choices made by vase-producers and the preferences of their customers. Individual chapters consider the popularity of different vessel shapes over time, the use of highly generic decorative scenes, which are characteristic of Apulian red-figure, as well as the popularity of scenes of myth, images of the gods, scenes of the life of the non-Greek population of ancient Puglia, and those showing funerary monuments. As virtually all of the vases in the sample derive from tombs, the patterns identified provide insights into the ways in which the ancient populations of South-East Italy, both Greek and indigenous, honoured their dead.