At the margins of ancient Mediterranean urbanism: settlements and social organization in Samnium, central Italy, 4th-1st centuries BCE

ABSTRACT

There is still debate as to whether non-urbanized regions of the ancient world developed forms of socioeconomic and political organization that diverged significantly from those in city-state contexts. This article addresses the issue by focusing on Samnium, in the uplands of central Italy, which has been considered a periphery of Mediterranean urbanism. According to modern reconstructions, in the last four centuries BCE, the region’s dispersed settlement system would have supported alternative forms of sociopolitical organization based on ethnic or “tribal” rather than civic identification. I propose to develop this view by analysing a sample of settlement sites that were apparently exceptional in the region, owing to their increased size, their large-scale public structures, and particularly their diverse range of socioeconomic activities and occupations. I delineate some important implications of these settlements for our understanding of this non-urbanized context, in terms of the socioeconomic profile of such centres (possibly more egalitarian in terms of the social division of manual labour and access to material comfort), as well as of the political dimension these places may have developed, acting at times jointly, at others alternatively to broader ethnic settlements. The aim is to contribute with interpretative parameters for the study of less- or non-urbanized societies of the remote past.

KEYWORDS:
Urbanization; Ancient Mediterranean; Written and material culture sources