Ancient peoples of Italy

Ethnic groups within the Italian peninsula, 9th to the 4th centuries BC. Subsequently the invasions of the Gauls and the defensive activities of the Roman Republic made large changes in the map.

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Ancient people of Italy are all those people that lived in Italy (including the islands of Sicily and Sardinia) before the Roman domination.

Not all of these various people are linguistically or ethnically closely related. Some of them spoke Italic languages, others spoke Greek because of the arrival of Hellenic colonists, while others belonged to another Indo-European branch or were non-Indo-European. The classification of a few of these ethnicons is unknown or disputed.

In the absence of any knowledge of ethnicity in Italy before writing, the date of the invention of writing there, the 7th century BC, must serve as the only certain terminus post quem for known ethnicons. They must be defined primarily on language. Other critera: shared descent, customs, religion, etc., remain unevidenced by any historical document. Mention of cultural heritage in mythology is uncertain and equivocal at best. It can only be used to support or contradict facts already known by the methods of history.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Prussian archaeologist, Gustaf Kossinna, formulated his concept of a "settlement archaeology," which asserted that an ethnic group is to be identified with an archaeological horizon. The concept appeared to give historians the ability to identify ancient ethnic groups just by looking at the archaeology; for example, the La Tène Culture was considered to be a diagnostic of the Celts. It would be difficult to find a concept more influential on the study of prehistory, and yet "Kossinna's Law", as it came to be called, began to be abandoned during the explosion of archaeology following World War II.

In Italy specifically the scholar who initiated the end of Kossinna's Law was Massimo Pallottino. He noticed that the archaeological cultures of Italy around the time of the invention of writing did not on the whole correspond to the documented ethnicons. He argued that terms such as "the Terramare culture" or "the Apennine culture" have no ethnic or linguistic significance. And yet he himself used these distinctions partially in some cases in attempting to trace the entry of Italics or their ancestors into Italy. Like the mythology, archaeology can only be used in a limited way to support or contradict the historical evidence.

Stone age

Palaeolithic

The presence of the Homo neanderthalensis has been demonstrated in archaeological findings dating to c. 50,000 years ago (late Pleistocene). There are some 20 such sites, the most important being that of the Grotta Guattari at San Felice Circeo, on the Tyrrhenian Sea south to Rome. Other are the grotta di Fumane (province of Verona), grotta San Bernardino ( province of Vicenza) and the Breuil grotto, also in San Felice.

Modern humans appeared during the upper Palaeolithic. Remains of the Aurignacian variety have been found in the grotta of Fumane, dating to c. 34,000 years ago.

Neolithic

Further information: Pre-Indo-European and Neolithic Europe

Ages of metals

Chalcolithic

Remains of the later prehistoric age have been found in Liguria, Lombardy (stone carvings in Valcamonica) . The most famous is perhaps that of Ötzi the Iceman, the mummy of a mountain hunter found in the Similaun glacier in South Tyrol, dating to c. 3000 BC (Copper Age).

During Copper Age, at the same time of the appearance of metalwork, Indo-European people migrated to Italy. Approximatively four waves of population from north to the Alps have been identified by archeological evidence:

1. Around the mid-3rd millennium BC, from populations who imported copper smithing. The Remedello culture (ca. 3400 - 2800 BC) took over the Po Valley.

Bronze age

2. From late-3rd to early-2nd millennium BC, with tribes coming both from the north and from the Franco-iberian area identified with the Beaker culture (ca. 2400 – 1800 BC) and by the use of bronze smithing, in the Padan Plain, in Tuscany and on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily.

Expansion of the Urnfields through Europe. In Italy the late Bronze Age Protovillanovan and Canegrate culture are associated with the expansion of this culture

.

3. In the mid-2nd millennium BC, associated with the Terramare culture (ca. 1700-1150 BC.). The Terramare culture takes its name from the black earth (terremare) residue of settlement mounds, which have long served the fertilizing needs of local farmers. The occupations of the terramare people as compared with their Neolithic predecessors may be inferred with comparative certainty. They were still hunters, but had domesticated animals; they were fairly skillful metallurgists, casting bronze in moulds of stone and clay, and they were also agriculturists, cultivating beans, the vine, wheat and flax. The later Latino-faliscan people have been associated with this culture.

Iron age

4. From the late 2nd millennium to the early 1st millennium BC, the Iron Age Proto-villanovan culture (ca. 1100 - 900 BC), related to the Central European Urnfield culture, brought iron-working to the Italian peninsula. Proto-villanovans practiced cremation and buried the ashes of their dead in pottery urns of distinctive double-cone shape. Generally speaking, Proto-villanovan settlements has been found in almost all the Italian peninsula from Veneto to eastern Sicily (Milazzo), although they were most numerous in the northern-central part of Italy. The most important settlement excavated are those of Frattesina in Veneto region, Bismantova in Emilia-Romagna and near the Monti della Tolfa, north of Rome .

Villanovan Culture in 900 BC

In Campania, a region where inhumation was the general practice, proto-villanovan cremation burials have been identified at Capua, at the "princely tombs" of Pontecagnano near Salerno (finds conserved in the Museum of Agro Picentino) and at Sala Consilina.

Situation of the Golasecca culture (9th - 4th century BC) to the south of the Hallstatt culture (1200 - 475 BC).

The later Osco-Umbrian, Veneti (and possibly the Latino-Faliscans too) have been associated with this culture. In Tuscany and in part of Emilia-Romagna the proto-villanovan culture was followed by the Villanovan Culture, often associated with the non-indoeuropean Etruscans.

In the 13th century BC proto-Celts (probably the ancestors of the Lepontii people) coming from the area of modern day Switzerland, eastern France and south-western Germany entered in Northern Italy (Lombardy and eastern Piedmont) starting the Canegrate culture whom not long time after, merging with the indigenous, and originally Pre-Indo-European^{[citation needed]}, Ligurians, produced the mixed Golasecca culture.

About this time, Illyrians tribes migrated from the Balkan coasts to Apulia.

Italic people

The term Italic people is used in various meanings, indicating one or more groups of people in Ancient Italy. In the strict and narrow meaning, the term refers to all the people who spoke Osco-Umbrian Indo-European languages and had settled along the Apennines,^{[citation needed]} from Umbria to Calabria.

Italics as Osco-Umbrians

The Oscan language in the 5th century BC.

Further information: Osco-Umbrian languages

Within the narrower meaning, "Italics" are regarded, especially by linguists, as those belonging to the Osco-Umbrian or Sabellian people,^{[citation needed]} characterized by the use of Osco-Umbrian languages, an Indo-European language family attested in the Italian peninsula between the 2nd millennium BC and the first centuries of the 1st millennium A.D. This is the general term used in specialized historiography.^{[citation needed]}

Italics as Osco-Umbrians and Latino-Faliscis

Further information: Latino-Faliscan languages

In a larger sense,^{[citation needed]} "Italic" means the set of two ancient similar Indo-European groups: next to Osco-Umbrian, this set also includes Latino-Faliscis (or "Latino-Venetis" if also the membership of the ancient Veneti is accepted). It is therefore the set of all Indo-Europeans present exclusively in Italy in antiquity, and excludes Indo-European people that were present also in other areas of Europe, such as the Cisalpine Gaul Celtic family or the Messapians (related to the Illyrians).

Italics as people of Ancient Italy

Further information: Italiotes and Siceliotes

In improper sense, the term "Italics" is sometimes used, especially in the non-specialized literature, to refer to all pre-Roman people of Italy, including therefore (definitely or supposedly) not Indo-European lineages as the Etruscans, Ligurians or Raetians. The ancient Greeks designated this kind of people, at least limitedly to the areas of Magna Graecia where they were in contact with them, with the term "Italiotes" also resumed later with a different meaning.

Ancient people of Central Italy in the 5th century BC.

Evolution of the concept of "Italia"

Initially, the Indo-Europeanist scholars were inclined to postulate for the various people speaking Indo-European Italic languages, namely those belonging to Indo-European language families attested exclusively in Italy in antiquity, a separate unitarian branch of the Indo-European languages, parallel for example to the Celtic or Germanic ones, and this was identified under the common label of "Italic". The founder of this hypothesis is considered Antoine Meillet (1866–1936).

However, this unitarian pattern was radically critiqued starting with the work of Alois Walde (1869–1924). Arguments by Vittore Pisani (1899–1990) and Giacomo Devoto (1897–1974) identified two distinct branches of Indo-European Italic languages and people who spoke them.^{[citation needed]} This idea was variously reformulated in the years after World War II, and finally imposed, although the specific traits of similarities and differences among the branches, and the process of formation and penetration in Italy, are still researched by the historical linguistics.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Genetic history of Italy
• History of Italy
• Nuragic civilization, about Sardinia
• Prehistoric Italy
• List of ancient peoples of Italy

Bibliography

• Ermanno A. Arslan, "Dimenticati dalla storia: i gruppi celtici minori della Cisalpina. Una rilettura di Plinio, Naturalis historia, e di Livio, Ab urbe condita" [1]
• Gianna G. Buti e Giacomo Devoto, Preistoria e storia delle regioni d'Italia, Sansoni Università, 1974
• Giacomo Devoto, Gli antichi Italici, 2a ed. Firenze, Vallecchi, 1951.
• Sabatino Moscati, Così nacque l'Italia: profili di popoli riscoperti, Società editrice internazionale, Torino 1998.
• Vittore Pisani, Lingue preromane d'Italia. Origini e fortune, 1978.
• Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, Italia, omnium terrarum alumna, Officine grafiche Garzanti Milano, Garzanti-Schewiller, 1990
• Francisco Villar, Gli Indoeuropei e le origini dell'Europa, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1997. ISBN 88-15-05708-0
• Pallottino, Massimo; J. Cremona (Translator); David Ridgway (Editor) (1975). "1 Italy at the Dawn of History". The Etruscans (Revised and Enlarged ed.). Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press. pp. 37–63. ISBN 0-253-32080-1.