EARLY ITALIAN CITIES
The basic pattern of social and economic life in peninsular Italy was established early. For centuries after the first appearance of agriculture around 4000 B.C., Italy was a land of villages with simple forms of economic and social organization. Settlements were very small, usually with no more than a few huts and outbuild-ings and less than one hundred inhabitants. Villagers planted barley and several types of wheat, and they raised sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs. Their technology was simple, and signs of occupational specialization are few. For millennia, Italian communities produced pottery in a range of styles and forms.
At other times and places, the production of pottery could be a highly skilled craft, and devices were in use which require a high degree of expertise, such as the potter’s wheel, for example, which allows for more regular shapes, and high-temperature kilns, which provide harder and finer surfaces. In Italy, neither the potter’s wheel nor high-temperature kilns were used before the appearance of cities. In earlier centuries, too, specialized potters were almost certainly not involved in the craft; the manufacture of ceramics, in other words, was primarily a household activity. Tools necessary in everyday life were generally made of wood, bone, or stone.
The social and political organization of these villages was relatively simple and egalitarian. There are no signs of marked distinctions in wealth, nor are there indications that adults made their living in markedly different ways. Elsewhere and at other times, kinship, age, and gender often served as the chief means of internal regulation in communities of this scale. The existence of larger “tribal” entities is uncertain; links between neighboring settlements could easily be man-aged within structures of kinship and intermarriage. The use of metals provides the only clear example of more sophisticated tech-niques and some craft specialization. Around 2000, copper tools and ornaments appear in the material remains. In the succeeding Early (c. 1800–1600) and Middle (c. 1600–1300) Bronze Ages, a limited range of tools, weapons, and ornaments were made of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Metalworking was a task for specialists, since it requires both expertise and organization: materials must be acquired, often from great distances, and the processes of refining the ore and cast¬ing the metal require knowledge and skill. In the Middle Bronze Age, throughout peninsular Italy artifacts of copper and bronze exhibit much standardization in form and techniques of manufacture; this may indicate that experts moved from village to village in search of markets for their skills.