The Peoples Of Ancient Italy

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.

A collection of essays on the peoples and communities of ancient, and mainly pre-Roman Italy.

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

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

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.

Malaria and Rome is the first comprehensive study of malaria in ancient Italy since the research of the distinguished Italian malariologist Angelo Celli in the early twentieth century. It demonstrates the importance of disease patterns and history in understanding the demography of ancient populations. Robert Sallares argues that malaria became increasingly prevalent in Roman times in central Italy as a result of ecological change and alterations to the physical landscapesuch as deforestation. Making full use of contemporary sources and comparative material from other periods, he shows that malaria had a significant effect on mortality rates in certain regions of Roman Italy.Robert Sallares incorporates all the important advances made in many relevant fields since Celli's time. These include recent geomorphological research on the evolution of the coastal environments of Italy that were notorious for malaria in the past, biomolecular research on the evolution of malaria, ancient DNA as a new source of evidence for malaria in antiquity, the differentiation of mosquito species that permits understanding of the phenomenon of anophelism without malaria (where theclimate is optimal for malaria and Anopheles mosquitoes are present, but there is no malaria), and recent medical research on the interactions between malaria and other diseases.The argument develops with a careful interplay between the modern microbiology of the disease and the Greek and Latin literary texts. Both contemporary sources and comparative material from other periods are used to interpret the ancient sources. In addition to the medical and demographic effects on the Roman population, Malaria and Rome considers the social and economic effects of malaria, for example on settlement patterns and on agricultural systems. Robert Sallares also examinesthe varied human responses to and interpretations of malaria in antiquity, ranging from the attempts at rational understanding made by the Hippocratic authors and Galen to the demons described in the magical papyri.

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.