Animal Bones in Archaeology Book of Notes and Drawings for Beginners. By Michael L. Ryder. (Mammal Society Handbooks.) Pp. xxiv + 65. (Blackwell (Scientific): Oxford and Edinburgh. Published for the Mammal Society, 1969.) 17s.

Digging up Bones

H. H. Lamb's latest book on the earth's changing climate is a carefully crafted work covering four areas: the physical basis of climate and climate change, the methods of climate reconstruction, the history of climate since the height of the last glaciation, and the impact of climate on human affairs. The book will be of particular interest to three groups. Atmospheric scientists interested in the long history of climate behavior (but perhaps overwhelmed by Lamb's all-encompassing work on the topic, Climate: Past, Present and Future, vol. II, Methuen, New York), will find Climate History and the Modern World to be a good titration of the fuller work. Scientists in other fields, including social scientists grappling with issues of climate-society interaction, will find the book a good entree into the field. Finally, Lamb himself suggests that the book will be useful to resource managers and other decision makers trying to avoid negative climate impacts. With this last audience in mind, no doubt, Lamb has chosen a style that eschews extensive footnoting and references (though sufficient citations are included to lead to further information). This works quite well and seems reasonable in view of his carefully documented previous writings.

Climate History and the Modern World

Strabo's Geography, completed in the early first century AD, is the primary source for the history of Greek geography. This Guide provides the first English analysis of and commentary on this long and difficult text, and serves as a companion to the author's The Geography of Strabo, the first English translation of the work in many years. It thoroughly analyzes each of the seventeen books and provides perhaps the most thorough bibliography as yet created for Strabo's work. Careful attention is paid to the historical and cultural data, the thousands of toponyms, and the many lost historical sources that are preserved only in the Geography. This volume guides readers through the challenges and complexities of the text, allowing an enhanced understanding of the numerous topics that Strabo covers, from the travels of Alexander and the history of the Mediterranean to science, religion, and cult.

A Historical and Topographical Guide to the Geography of Strabo

This book presents a radical new interpretation of Roman expansion in Italy during the fourth and third centuries BCE. Nicola Terrenato argues that the process was accomplished by means of a grand bargain that was negotiated between the landed elites of central and southern Italy, while military conquest played a much smaller role than is usually envisaged. Deploying archaeological, epigraphic, and historical evidence, he paints a picture of the family interactions that tied together both Roman and non-Roman aristocrats and that resulted in their pooling power and resources for the creation of a new political entity. The book is written in accessible language, without technical terms or quotations in Latin, and is heavily illustrated.

The Early Roman Expansion into Italy: Elite Negotiation and Family Agendas

Migration, Identity, and Multilingualism in Late Hellenistic Delos

List of Tables List of Figures Introduction 1. Locating the Samnites 2. Society and Culture in Iron Age Samnium 3. The Roman Intervention 4. Settlement and Society between the Conquest and the Social War 5. The Impact of Rome Conclusion Appendix: List of Sites Bibliography

Ancient Samnium: Settlement, Culture, and Identity between History and Archaeology

This article approaches gender as a means of understanding cultural identity in Italy before the Roman conquest. Most scholars have assumed based on written sources that the ancient inhabitants of Samnium, who are noted for their fierce resistance to Rome, shared a gender system in which men were primarily regarded as warriors and women as caretakers of the household. Archaeological support for this view has been sought in the contrast between burials containing weapons (assumed to belong to men) and those containing jewelry or personal ornaments (attributed to women). In line with recent studies that challenge such a view, I employ statistical methods to verify correlations between grave goods, sex, age, and social status. Results reveal that cultural attitudes toward gender among the Samnites were complex. In many cases, gender configurations were structured in such a way that both men and women performed similar social activities and may have participated as equals in commensal politics. These findings demonstrate the potential for quantitative archaeological analysis to enhance our knowledge of cultural identity and social organization in an area of the ancient world for which there is very little written evidence.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3764/aja.118.2.0241

Gender and Ritual in Ancient Italy: A Quantitative Approach to Grave Goods and Skeletal Data in Pre-Roman Samnium

This article approaches the agency of displaced people through material evidence from the distant past. It seeks to construct a narrative of displacement where the key players include human as well as non-human agents—namely, the environment into which people move, and the socio-political and environmental context of displacement. Our case-study from ancient Italy involves potentially marginalized people who moved into agriculturally challenging lands in Daunia (one of the most drought-prone areas of the Mediterranean) during the Roman conquest (late fourth-early second centuries BCE). We discuss how the interplay between socio-political and environmental forces may have shaped the agency of subaltern social groups on the move, and the outcomes of this process. Ultimately, this analysis can contribute towards a framework for the archaeological study of marginality and mobility/displacement—while addressing potential limitations in evidence and methods.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/7/4/116/pdf/1

The Agency of the Displaced? Roman Expansion, Environmental Forces, and the Occupation of Marginal Landscapes in Ancient Italy

Summary

This article addresses the meaning of community in an area of the ancient world that is normally seen to diverge from the paradigm of the Classical city-state, by examining the role of sanctuaries in the articulation of identity and belonging. The focus is on Samnium (central Italy) in the last four centuries BC, where archaeological and historical evidence, including a wealth of recent discoveries, supports a dynamic view of a region that is traditionally associated with a cohesive ethnic group. Whilst it is true that the major sanctuary at Pietrabbondante fostered the construction of Samnite ethnic identity, this article highlights the importance of other types and levels of belonging in light of a broader range of cult sites. The concept of ‘nested identities’ (a scenario where individuals identify simultaneously with overlapping groups) can bring about a more nuanced view of how cult was used as a means to negotiate belonging on ethnic and non-ethnic levels. I hope to show that local communities, and particularly the local elites, were able to function independently rather than simply as the building blocks of the Samnite ethnos.

Building Communities in Ancient Samnium: Cult, Ethnicity and Nested Identities

This article demonstrates how a contextual approach to material culture can help us think about the link between Roman hegemony and cultural change in Republican Italy. It does this by focusing on a particular set of artefacts — anatomical votive terracottas — that have been seen to indicate the spread of Roman and/or Latin culture in central Italy. Although the use of anatomical terracottas may have begun in the vicinity of Rome, communities in central Italy actively engaged with these artefacts according to their own cultural dispositions. Such signs of local agency are especially visible in the way that worshippers in the Apennine areas of central Italy favoured votive terracottas depicting legs, feet and hands, instead of reproductive organs, which were more popular in the Tyrrhenian zone. These findings emphasise the key role of local cultural practice in shaping the effect of accelerated political change on the micro-level.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0068246215000021

Rafael Scopacasa

Papers

Ancient Samnium: Settlement, Culture, and Identity between History and Archaeology

Gender and Ritual in Ancient Italy: A Quantitative Approach to Grave Goods and Skeletal Data in Pre-Roman Samnium

The Agency of the Displaced? Roman Expansion, Environmental Forces, and the Occupation of Marginal Landscapes in Ancient Italy

Building Communities in Ancient Samnium: Cult, Ethnicity and Nested Identities

Moulding cultural change: a contextual approach to anatomical votive terracottas in central italy, fourth–second centuries bc