Iron Age in Latium

The necropolis of Rocca Pia in Tivoli, near Rome, was in constant use from the end of the 9th century BC to the third quarter of the 8th century BC. After almost 50 years of disuse, new tombs were opened  during the so-called Middle and Late Orientalising periods (660/650-600/580 BC).
    Out of the 76 burials found in this cemetery, 15 belonged to infants and children. Many of them were found in close proximity to other burials, suggesting the existence of  family groups.
    These tombs contained different types of funerary grave goods. Five infant and child burials can be attributed to younger members of high-ranking families; a few other graves belonged to infants and children of lower social status, perhaps young servants or “foreign” slaves captured during  local war raids.
    Five of the infant/child graves were placed inside Circles marked by stones or travertine slabs. These Circles probably served to highlight the particular status of  children and/or to segregate them.
    This paper presents a possible interpretation of the evidence and suggests unusual burial rituals with rites of defensive magic and/or blood sacrifices offered in honour of the gods and of individual of higher status  buried in graves under the tombs of children.

This study has on the basis of coarse ware from Ficana discussed aspects relating to production and function, changes in production reflecting changes in social organisation, and the role of the settlement in a larger region. The material, roughly 3800 sherds of coarse pottery, are from zona 6b at the Latin settlement Ficana, south-west of Rome. The majority dates from ca. 650 to 300 BC, though it covers the period 900 BC to AD 200.

The first section used production methods and use alterations to outline possible intended and actual function of the coarse ware vessels. Production was interpreted as keeping to set requirements, which were not necessarily constant over time, but represented a minimum of what would make most vessels function adequately. Shape, size and surface treatment were found to be the primary concerns outside the basic requirements in adapting vessels to specific purposes.

The second part showed that production became increasingly standardised. The changes are interpreted as part of a process towards greater efficiency, thus alterations in surface treatment are considered to have saved time, not reflecting new uses for the vessels. The largest vessels continued to be made in a less efficient mode, primarily because their size limited the options of production methods.

The transformation of production modes is a process that has been witnessed in much of Etruria and Latium, which helps place the zona 6b material into a larger context. Though pottery producing facilities have not been found at Ficana, it is argued in the third section that many factors, both from the coarse ware and structures in zona 6b, as well as by comparison to other sites, support pottery production at the site, possibly even in zona.

The material shows that Ficana is part of a larger koine in terms of pottery in Latium and Etruria in the respective period. This also indicates some correspondence in aspects such as diet, and possibly social structures. The contact between the settlements must have been considerable, resulting in a development of common standards and ideas, which in this study has been shown to be prevalent over expressions of cultural distinctions.

Through these analyses it has been aimed to demonstrate the value of coarse ware in studies of past societies, and the information obtained supports further studies of such material, instead of a narrow focus on fine wares.

On the eve of the Peloponnesian War Athens was a great urban agglomeration. It was almost invulnerable to an enemy. So in 431 B.C. the Athenians began to migrate from the countryside into the city on the advice of Pericles (Thuc. 2.14–16). This recalled to Thucydides the time of Theseus (Thuc. 2.15). S. Hornblower regards this migration as the long-postponed physical synoikism, or synoikism in its physical aspect. He insists on the difference between political and physical synoikism, the former being the political unification of the state and the latter mainly the migration into the city. But the Athenians did not migrate into the city for the first time in 431. At the time of Xerxes' invasion the inhabitants of Attica were to be moved into the city before being evacuated to Salamis and elsewhere, and the invasion made their vulnerability clear to the Athenians. They suffered two evacuations, the devastation of Attica and the substantial destruction of Athens. Through driving ba...

Herodotus relates the account of a meeting between Hippocrates, the father of the future Athenian tyrant, and the famed Spartan ephor Chilon. The passage contains much novelized material; I nonetheless argue we may extract some information of historical value from it. The account proves the activity of the Peisistratid family on the Pan-Hellenic level since the onset of the VI century. The information is cross-referenced with the attestation of the existence of bond of friendship-hospitality between the Peisistratids and Sparta in the last years of the VI century: the conclusion I propose is that the circumstances for its first institution were provided by the meeting between Hippocrates and Chilon two generations earlier.

The aim of this book is to present an in-depth analysis of the socio-economic dynamics that took place from the Bronze Age until the middle of the eighth century BC, in the Latium Vetus (Italy). To understand the archaeological record, knowledge of the transformations through time of the various landscape units is necessary. Such knowledge was obtained by studying historical, geological and pedological maps, and by using air photography, pollen diagrams and soil augering as well as observations in the field. The presentation of the evidences takes the form of a catalogue that lists 232 sites: settlements, tombs (both isolated and necropoleis), hoards and ritual loci. This is the first time that all available archaeological evidence of the study area is catalogued in a single format. Furthermore, a number of locational variables for each site were analysed, using GIS techniques and statistical analysis, in order to identify certain tendencies in the location of settlements. A functional analysis of the catalogued sites was also conducted considering the potential natural harbours along the coast and evaluating the agricultural potential of the sites’ territories. In the concluding chapter an up-to-date explanation of the emergence of social inequality and the warrior elite is proposed as well as a global (proto)history of the subsistence economy and settlement patterns in the Bronze Age and Iron Age. In addition, a new and simple method is suggested for reconstructing the territories of the ancient protohistoric polities.

In this paper, presented at the 2020 conference 'Exchanging Ideas - Trade, Technology, and Connectivity in pre-Roman Italy' at the University of Auckland, I discuss the use of two-modal affiliation networks in the study of cultural interconnectivity reflected in funerary contexts of the sites of Crustumerium and Satricum.
As part of this discussion, I introduce the concept of consumption collectives, which serves the multi-scalar analysis of how these two Latial communities participated in various consumptionscapes of the wider Mediterranean world.
Affiliation networks constructed for both sites on the basis of funerary contexts dating to Latial period IVA (ca. 720-620BC), illustrate the developed methodology and form the basis for a preliminary comparative analysis of the cultural interconnectivity characterising funerary contexts of Latium Vetus.