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.

Scholarship has widely debated the question about the existence of an 'Italian identity' in the time of the Roman Republic, basing on the few sources available and on the outcomes of the Augustan and imperial age. In this sense, this debate has for a long time been conducted without sufficient imput from social sciences, and particularly from social geography, which has developed methodologies and models for the investigation of identities. This book starts therefore from the consideration that Italy came to be, by the end of the Republic, a region within the Roman imperium, and investigates the ways this happened and its consequences on the local populations and their identity structures. It shows that Italy gained a territorial and symbolic shape, and own institutions defining it as a territorial region, and that a regional identity developed as a consequence by the 2nd century BCE. The original, interdisciplinary approach to the matter allows a consistent revision of the ancient sources and sheds now light on the topic, providing important reflections for future studies on the subject.

In the first millennium BC, communities in Italy underwent crucial transformations which scholars have often subsumed under the heading of ‘state formation’, namely increased social stratification, the centralization of political power and, in some cases, urbanization. Most research has tended to approach the phenomenon of state formation and social change in relation to specific territorial dynamics of growth and expansion, changing modes of exploitation of food and other resources over time, and the adoption of selected socio-ritual practices by the ruling élites in order to construct and negotiate authority. In contrast, comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of how these key developments resonated across the broader social transect, and how social groups other than ruling élites both promoted these changes and experienced their effects. The chief aim of this collection of 14 papers is to harness innovative approaches to the exceptionally rich mortuary evidence of first millennium BC Italy, in order to investigate the roles and identities of social actors who either struggled for power and social recognition, or were manipulated and exploited by superior authorities in a phase of tumultuous sociopolitical change throughout the entire Mediterranean basin. Contributors provide a diverse range of approaches in order to examine how power operated in society, how it was exercised and resisted, and how this can be studied through mortuary evidence. Section 1 addresses the construction of identity by focusing mainly on the manipulation of age, ethnic and gender categories in society in regions and sites that reached notable power and splendor in first millennium BC Italy. These include Etruria, Latium, Campania and the rich settlement of Verucchio, in Emilia Romagna. Each paper in Section 2 offers a counterpoint to a contribution in Section 1 with an overall emphasis on scholarly multivocality, and the multiplicity of the theoretical approaches that can be used to read the archaeological evidence.

This book takes an innovative approach to detecting regional groupings in peninsular Italy during the Late Bronze Age, a notoriously murky period of Italian prehistory. Applying social network analysis to the distributions of imports and other distinctive objects, Emma Blake reveals previously unrecognized exchange networks that are in some cases the precursors of the named peoples of the first millennium BC: the Etruscans, the Veneti, and others. In a series of regional case studies, she uses quantitative methods to both reconstruct and analyze the character of these early networks and posits that, through path dependence, the initial structure of the networks played a role in the success or failure of the groups occupying those same regions in later times. This book thus bridges the divide between Italian prehistory and the Classical period, and demonstrates that Italy's regionalism began far earlier than previously thought.

What makes Classics "global", and what does it mean to study the ancient world "globally"? How can the study of antiquity contribute to our understanding of pressing global issues? Global Classics addresses these questions by pursuing a transdisciplinary dialogue between Classics and Global Studies. Authoritative and engaging, this book provides the first field-wide synthesis of the recent "global turn" in Classics as well as a comprehensive overview of an emerging field in ancient studies. Through focused readings of ancient sources and modern scholarship, the author introduces readers to three key paradigms that are essential to research and teaching in global antiquities: transborder, transhistorical, and transdisciplinary. Global Classics will appeal to educators, students, and scholars interested in the application of globalization theories and paradigms in ancient studies, in globalizing their teaching and research, and in approaches to contemporary global issues through the study of the remote past.