Tracing the Transformation of Southern Italy in The Long Fourth Century BCE

This book traces the transformations and developments in Southern Italy in the period from the late fifth century to the establishment of Roman political control in this area, the “long” fourth century BCE.

Tracing the Transformation of Southern Italy primarily focuses on dynamics within and among Italic communities in South Italy, but it also addresses transformations induced by entanglements with “Greek”/Italiote cities, connections with the wider Mediterranean world, and encounters with the emerging power of Rome. The contributions present a new and multifaceted picture for understanding the rapidly changing regional landscape at the threshold of “pre-Roman” and “early Roman” Southern Italy. This volume builds a new narrative of fourth-century Southern Italy based on the full breadth of archaeological evidence, rather than on later literary voices. It does so by combining research on various regions and by cutting across the compartmentalisation in the archaeology of Southern Italy, often based on regional studies or notions of past ethnic grouping. Paying attention to the dynamics between the regional and local, it also utilises different arrays of archaeological evidence that are often analysed in separation to provide a holistic picture that liberates the vision of the long fourth century from the dominance of the literary tradition.

Offering a rounded picture of South Italy in this transformative period, based on a wide variety of evidence, this book is for researchers in Classical archaeology as well as historians with an interest in landscape and settlement studies, social formation, craft developments, iconography and cult of the period.