Review Article

Challenging text in early Italy

Simon Stoddart
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge,
Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK
(Email: ss16@hermes.cam.ac.uk)

Books Reviewed

KIM BOWES, KAREN FRANCIS & RICHARD HODGES (ed.). Between text and territory: survey and excavations in the Terra of San Vincenzo al Volturno (British School at Rome Archaeological Monograph 16). xiv+356 pages, 195 illustrations, 35 tables. 2006. London: British School at Rome; 978-0-904152-48-0 paperback £ 49.50.

ELENA ISAYEV. Inside ancient Lucania: dialogues in history & archaeology (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 90). xvii+284 pages, 40 b&w & colour illustrations. 2007. London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London; 978-1-905670-03-1 paperback £ 50.

VEDIA IZZET. The archaeology of Etruscan society: identity, surface and material culture in Archaic Etruria. xii+320 pages, 42 illustrations. 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-0-521-85877-9 hardback £ 55 & $99.

The term protohistory has unfashionable connotations for many Anglophone archaeologists, but the continental European term does precisely evoke the restricted literacy that governed many societies in pre-Roman and early post-Roman Italy. All three volumes address that methodological challenge of combining textual and non-textual sources in the reconstruction of past societies. All three volumes implicitly question how universal the motives for writing are - can we apply the modernist criteria of George Orwell (1946) to early societies?

Within the framework of these challenges, the contents of the three volumes under review are methodologically diverse. San Vincenzo is essentially a fieldwork report situated within an interpretative framework. Ancient Lucania is an historical narrative evolving out of a doctoral dissertation. Etruscan society is a shorter cultural history, primarily of the sixth century BC, once again developing out of a doctoral dissertation. All the volumes show good integration with the archaeological evidence: not only its positive contributions, but also the difficult issues of sampling and, all too frequently, the problems associated with the presence and dating of pottery, essential to many of the key arguments, in particular in the two landscape-related volumes.

San Vincenzo

The San Vincenzo volume addresses the issue of text head on: 'the written text is no longer, in short, the pre-eminent instrument of analysis; it is one of many instruments' (p. 1). At the very least, archaeological texts contextualise the written texts. The San Vincenzo project, well known from many other publications, is here represented by a publication focused on a combination of small scale excavation (smaller sites and a cemetery) and field survey.

For the crucial early post-Roman protohistoric period, the twelfth century documentation appears, at first analysis, to have been broadly correct in defining the early medieval landscape as silva densissima, that is largely devoid of rural settlement. Indeed the local valley appears to have devolved, after a second century AD peak of rural settlement, into a relatively isolated backwater that only properly recovered in the tenth and eleventh centuries AD. The publication mentions, however, lingering worries about the detection of elusive nucleated late Antique sites, a problem enhanced by problems of pottery supply and aceramic material culture. Alternatively, the abbeys of Farfa in Sabina (if the dating of San Donato is correct) (Moreland et al. 1993) and Camaldoli in the Casentino (if the textual sources are correct) (Wickham 1988) may have followed different regional trajectories, which show greater prominence in the late Antique period. The Casentino case does highlight the difficulty, since rural settlement indicated by the monastic documents has yet to be found archaeologically. A further issue is that, while the countryside seems to have been empty, the site of San Vincenzo appears to have flourished. The combination of Christianity and the presence of low denomination coins may suggest an episcopal role for the community such as to produce aberrant prominence in an otherwise impoverished landscape.

Lucania

The Lucania volume takes up the challenge as follows: '... thanks to intense archaeological activity in recent decades, an alternative history is now possible ... Used with caution and imagination, a combination of archaeological evidence and written sources can provide not only a more complete but also a more vibrant picture of historical processes' (p. 1). Furthermore, when tackling the question of identity, the multiple textual and non-textual sources establish a difference between textual perceptions and self-perceptions which can emerge from material culture. The author concludes that the prominent operating identities were more local and fluid than those defined externally by the Classical authors (pp. 9-31), and, more specifically, that a binding religious cult (more easily recognisable by idealising textual sources) was an unlikely element for the construction of identity. She finds that the settlement and burial evidence concurs with this interpretation, where small communities and localities are generally the locus where identity is expressed.

The book's second part examines the incorporation of these localised identities within the larger scale political organisation of Rome. It begins with an interesting methodological point about the relative ability of archaeology to fill the gap left by the loss of Livy's textual coverage of the period 292-221 BC, unfortunately straddling the threshold of the very process under examination. In terms of settlement organisation - and the interests of many of the textual sources support this view - the fourth century BC appears to be a period when competition between rival aggrandising forces promoted fortification. On the other hand, archaeology also reveals an increase in dispersed settlement. A further problem is that there is conflicting archaeological evidence about the timing of the abandonment of these sites in the third century BC, precisely the period of political transition. In spite of these methodological difficulties, what is uncovered is another example of the diversity of the pre-Roman landscape of Italy which encouraged different strategies of political incorporation by Rome.

Etruscan society

The Etruscan volume addresses a more radical agenda, one that, while drawing on more widely applied current theory, also introduces a strong element of theoretical originality. Text-led approaches to the Etruscans have brought with them a cargo of Hellenic influences. Here the author seeks to uncover active agency within the Etruscan communities as a replacement for the interpretations that considered the Etruscans privileged to imitate the Greeks. Although the author cunningly starts in an apparently conservative manner by introducing ancient sources (when referring to texts), she soon explicitly states that 'for the Etruscans, it is not the texts of Greece and Rome but the Etruscan material record that must be taken as a starting point (my emphasis) for the investigation of their culture' (p. 13). She points out that the classicisation of Etruscan terminology is often extracted from relatively recent history and that it has been forced onto an earlier pre-Classical age. She seeks to engage with the Etruscan viewer in her understanding of Etruscan material culture by avoiding a Classical view of the past.

In this pursuit, she investigates the surface of Etruscan culture through a series of dimensions of mirrors, tombs, sanctuaries, houses and cities. These are set within the broader landscape, although perhaps some of the contextualisation in different landscapes is a theme which deserves further and more detailed exploration. I suspect that many readers will pause longest over the issues of gender which form one principal point of focus from a Classical perspective. It is, indeed, in the realm of mirrors that Izzet presents her most developed and integrated arguments; but there is also force in the way in which this detailed analysis is scaled up into a study of other structures, as part of a new way of presenting visual culture at a crucial stage in Etruscan cultural history. One word missing from the theoretical vocabulary is that of theatre, for much of the elaboration of surface, of difference, of boundaries, is situated in a theatrical scenery - the landscape - which would have enhanced the perceived effects.

The fine theatrical spectacle of Etruscan culture may, however, fall victim to deliberate dissection by more tightly focused Etruscologists. At one level, this will be the detailed perusing of minuscule elements that is a product of some Etruscological agendas. This will not, in itself, be problematic for Izzet's approach, because strength lies in the overall patterns. A potentially greater problem is that, in order to achieve the prescribed theoretical effect, Etruscan culture is largely envisaged as a unity by Izzet, without the fluidity of identity emphasised by many theoretical studies, and without the regionality that much of the contemporary first millennium BC entailed. Luisa Banti recognised as early as half a century ago (Banti 1960) the regionalised community focus of the Etruscans which cuts across any cultural unity. It is this tension between the undoubted many changes of the sixth century BC across all Etruria and their regional solutions which must form the scope of future research. The author is aware of this literature (p. 210) but has not yet explored the implications of the fact that the Other is not just between the textual Greek and the prehistoric Etruscan, but also between the individual communities of Etruria, and even, in a heterarchical manner, in the relations between the very descent groups of those same Etruscan communities.

Text and material text

Each of these volumes makes different engagements with the textual record, on an essentially historical (San Vincenzo), Classical (Lucania) or anthropological (Etruria) platform. The first two cover worlds that are closer to the modern which Orwell analysed in his discussion of why authors write: egoism, aestheticism, posterity and political agenda. The third volume covers a world of restricted, ritualised literacy where such modernist motives are less prominent.

At San Vincenzo, there are two crucial phases in the historical agenda. Kim Bowes (in 'Beyond Pirenne's shadow? Late Antique San Vincenzo reconsidered' in the San Vincenzo volume under review, pp. 287-305) states in her interpretation of the fifth and sixth century AD situation that '... San Vincenzo gestures to a world beyond Pirenne. Combining qualities of the city, the villa and the village, it resists easy categorisation and in so doing, pulls away the comfortable supports of long-distance trade and Episcopal presence upon which Pirenne and his many followers have rested the definition of the city and thus Romanitas.' In his interpretation of the ninth century AD, Richard Hodges (in 'Between text and territory: the Upper Volturno Valley in the early Middle Ages' in the same volume, pp. 307-11) declares 'Undoubtedly, the creation of the monastic city with its large associated borgo in the ninth century dramatically affected the history of settlement in the valley as a whole. Such a conclusion would be difficult to draw from the twelfth-century chronicler's account of the monastery's history.' These are major challenges to text, to the broad models that scholars such as Pirenne developed without the burden of (archaeological) data, in conditions of imprisonment that proved so profitable to a number of influential historians in both world wars (cf. Braudel). In the Lucania volume, the agenda is Classically based but the volume nevertheless concludes by stating that 'The material remains from ancient Lucania give a glimpse of the rich historical tapestry which lies beneath the narrative of the written sources.' Such new evidence ensures the rethinking of dichotomies created by the written sources, breaking down the definitions of urbanism and the Other. Only a few hints betray the intellectually Classical origins of the author, slipping into a vocabulary of 'ancient sources' (p. 138) instead of written sources or Greek terminologies such as oligarchy.

Whereas the first two volumes under review are, it could be suggested, embedded in the familiar, near modern, world, the Etruscan volume seeks to enter the strange, the unfamiliar, glimpsed by anthropological discourse in the Classical world's near neighbours. This is a world that emerges out of prehistory, where the effects of writing on Time are unfelt, and where other modes of thinking are expressed. While the other two volumes are important in the re-interpretation of their own regional traditions - Lucania and even Europe - the Etruscan volume has a relevance to material culture studies that transcends its region so much so that its impact will probably be less on Etruscan studies and more as a well-worked example of theoretical approaches within archaeology. This is the only volume to acknowledge explicitly the deep time of prehistory that lies behind documentary sources. From a prehistorian's perspective, the result is highly satisfying and stimulating. Most probably it will take time for the Etruscologist establishment to engage with the new language and approach that is implicit in its writing. At last there is a theoretical approach to Etruria that allows comparison released of the impact of text, rather than a mere co-existence joined unnaturally to Classical archaeology. All volumes reviewed here challenge text, but Izzet's book makes the most radical break with the past in a manner that at least this reader welcomes.

References

• BANTI, L. 1960. Il mondo degli Etruschi. Rome: Primato.
• MORELAND, J., M. PLUCIENNIK, M. RICHARDSON, A. FLEMING, G. STROUD, H. PATTERSON & J. DUNKLEY. 1993. Excavations at Casale San Donato, Castelnuovo di Farfa (RI), Lazio, 1992. Archeologia Medievale 20: 185-228.
• ORWELL, G. 1946. Why I write. Gangrel 4: 5-10.
• WICKHAM, C. 1988. The mountains and the city: the Tuscan Appennines in the early Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press.