Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Book excerpt: "This book describes the historical culture of Italy from the Early Iron Age to the Roman conquest, covering a period from roughly 900 - 300 BCE. By historical culture, I refer throughout to a broader concept of social engagement with the past than is sometimes meant by the word "history." But this move permits us, following Sahlins' suggestion, to consider all kinds of new things. There exists a substantial corpus of material, much of it archaeological, some of it newly discovered, which speaks to us about how local communities in early Italy thought and talked about their history and how they articulated their past and present. This material has yet to have much impact on the typical ways in which we reconstruct the process of "becoming historical" in Italy. Instead, the story tends to be told almost exclusively from the Roman perspective and in a teleology"--