Umbria before the Roman conquest

The aim of this chapter is to examine the processes affecting Umbrian communities in the Iron Age (c.900-300 BC), a period conventionally ended by the Roman conquest. A variety of geographical areas need to be assessed, in which increasing social complexity leads to a wide range of different social and political ‘trajectories’. The most important shift in terms of the long-term history of the region is that many settlements in the lowlands begin to undergo urbanization towards the end of this period, which marks the first signs of the system of city-states that characterized this region until the end of the Roman Empire. It is evident, however, that assessing contemporary upland communities simply in terms of their failure to develop urbanistic structures does not do justice to their sophistication in this period, which matched that of the future city sites. Thus, one of the central aims of this chapter is to draw attention to the unsatisfactory nature of urbanism as the predominant diagnostic index of early Italian societies.

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