INTRODUCTION

In approximately 740 B.C., an amphora of Greek type bearing various inscriptions (two of them in the Aramaic script and language) was deposited in the cemetery of the Euboean establishment at Pithecusa on the Bay of Naples. To define the archaeology of Italy as ‘text-aided’ from this time onwards is unduly optimistic, as the next chapter will show. Beforehand, however, there can be no doubt that it is wholly ‘text-free’: many sequences of events – essential to the comprehension of later periods – are concealed by the impersonal nature of prehistoric evidence and by the competing terminologies woven around it by prehistoric archaeologists. Furthermore, the distribution of the evidence for the prehistory of at least two Italian areas, later of vital interest to the historian, is more than usually uneven. South of the Tiber, in Latium vetus, official resources were concentrated between 1923 (the excavation of Riserva del Truglio) and 1971 (the excavation of Castel di Decima – discovered in 1953) on the discovery and excavation of the remains of imperial greatness, with scant attention even to the republican period and less still to the prisci Latini and to any conceivable predecessors they may have had. Similarly Etruria, in spite of the seemingly interminable preoccupation with the alleged enigma of Etruscan origins, has until very recently been considered the proper business of Etruscologists – to the substantial exclusion, in modern times, of the prehistorian (and indeed of the Romanist too).