Long before the emergence of Roman historical writing, the societies of Iron Age Italy were actively engaged in transmitting and using their past. This book provides a first account of this early historical interest, providing a sort of prehistory of historical thought in Italy leading down to the first encounters with Roman expansion. From the Early Iron Age to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Italian communities can be seen actively using burial practices, images, special objects, calendars, and various other media to record and transmit history. Drawing from current anthropological and archaeological theory, the book argues for collecting this material together under the broad rubric of "historical culture," as the socialized mode of engagement with the past.
The prevailing mode of historical culture in Italy develops alongside the wider structures of society, from the Early Iron Age to the early stages of urbanization, to the first encounters with Rome. Throughout the period, Italy's many communities possessed a far more extensive interest in history than scholarship has previously acknowledged. The book's fresh account of this historical culture also includes accessible presentation of several recent and important archaeological discoveries. Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy will be of wide interest to historians and archaeologists of Early Rome and Italy, as well as all those thinking broadly about modes of historical transmission, and the intersections between archaeology and history.
Author(s): Seth Bernard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: xviii+302
Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy. Archaeology, History, and the Use of the Past, 900–300 BCE
Contents
Maps
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Romans and Italians Writing History
Empire and Historiography in Republican Italy
Monumenta
Archaeology and/as History
Historical Culture
The Structure and Scope of the Book
2 Ancestors
Burial and Social Structure in Early Italy
Burial before History
Spatial Clustering
Spaces for Cult
Visibility
Monumentality
Objects
Writing
Ancestors in the Burial Ground
Conclusions
3 Cities
Continuity
Huts to Temples in Rome
Huts to Temples in Italy
Assessing Huts to Temples
Discontinuity
Foundation
Obliteration
Conclusions
4 Founders
Figures and Events
Founders’ Cults
Founders’ Cults: Poseidonia and Greek Colonial Italy
Founders’ Cults: Veii
Founders’ Cult: Exceptional Burials within Settlement Areas
Founders’ Cults: Tarquinia
Founders’ Cults: Rome
Founders’ Cults in Italy: Some Other Possibilities
Italian Founders’ Cult?
Greek Myth and Italian Founders’ Cults: Aeneas in Latium
Lavinium
Sol Indiges?
Castrum Inui
Evaluating the Archaeology of Aeneas
Conclusions
5 Time
The Annual Nail at Rome
Ritual Nails in Italy
Calendar Time: Early Rome
Time in the Pyrgi Tablets
The Capua Tile
The Magliano Lead Tablet
The Calendar of Oscan Capua
The Linen Book (liber linteus)
Calendrical Time in the Iguvine Tables?
Time in the Agnone Table
The Stele from Aveia
Lydus’ Brontoscopic Calendar and the Etruscan saeculum
Local Influences and Elite Character
Conclusions
6 Images
Beyond Fabius the Painter
Etruscan Historical Imagery: The François Tomb
Contextualizing the Francois Tomb: Historiography
Contextualizing the François Tomb: Iconography
Contextualizing the François Tomb: Style and Epigraphy
Historical Tomb Paintings in Campania
Daunia and Apulia
Hellenization?
Conclusions
7 Conclusions
From Ancestral Time to Civic Time
The Historical Culture of the Italian City
Looking Forward
Works Cited
Index
