Description
Book SynopsisLong 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.
Trade ReviewDeftly navigating between text driven Romanocentric narratives, and the world of memory studies, Bernard offers an original and revealing study of Italian historical culture. We meet ancestors and founders, cities in the making, and innovative descriptions of time. This is a book that rewrites the way the people of Italy in the first millennium BCE thought about their past, and in so doing, refreshes our notion of history itself. * Christopher Smith, University of St Andrews *
Far from being peoples without history, early Italians lived among a multitude of textual and material markers that spoke volumes about their own past. For the first time, this book gives a rich and resonant voice to non-Latin speakers throughout the peninsula, emphasizing the role of their historical narratives, typically overshadowed by those of the Romans. * Nic Terrenato, University of Michigan *
