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.

Christian Heitz is Senior Scientist at the Institut für Archäologien of the University of Innsbruck. He has been working in different areas, from the Aegean Bronze Age to Imperial Rome. Currently, he is studying contexts in the area of pre- and early Roman Southern Italy and excavation director at Ascoli Satriano (prov. Foggia/Apulia). His research topics range from social structure, gender issues and iconography to textile and pottery studies.

Matthias Hoernes is a Mediterranean archaeologist at the University of Vienna, specialising in the funerary archaeology of pre-Roman Southern Italy, particularly during the early Hellenistic period. He is also interested in transcultural encounters and dynamics in the Iron Age-Archaic Mediterranean, particularly in Sicily and Southern Italy, as well as archaeological university collections, their history and cultural heritage management.

Agnes Henning is Researcher and Curator of the Antiquities Collection at the Winckelmann-Institut of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research spans a wide spatial and chronological range, from Archaic Sicily and its Greek poleis to the provinces in the extreme east of the Roman Empire. The main focus of her research is on architecture and urbanism. In Southern Italy, she has been studying hilltop settlements and their fortifications in the mountains of Lucania for many years and has carried out several field research projects in this context.

Edward Robinson was Assistant Curator of the Nicholson Museum and then Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sydney. He conducted extensive fieldwork in Apulia and Basilicata. His principal research interests include ancient theatre, the iconography and archaeometry of south Italian pottery, especially overpainted and red-figure wares, and cross-cultural contact in the region.