Ancient Peoples of Italy

Ancient Peoples Of Italy

Ancient people of Italy are all those people that lived in the Italian peninsula and 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 Other critera: shared descent, customs, religion, etc., remain unevidenced by any historical document.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.