BURIAL PRACTICES OF EARLY ITALY
After all, groups that differ in many ways can construct similar buildings, they can make virtually identical tools and ornaments, and they can earn their livings in many of the same ways. Artifacts and techniques, in other words, can cross ethnic, linguistic, and political borders. Archeological cultures, then, are collections of traits in material goods, in technology, in funerary practices, in settlement forms, and in economic life. They are not political or linguistic units, nor need they have a single ethnic identity, either in their own eyes or in the opinions of their neighbors.
Finally, the broader significance of finds is not always apparent, and major problems in interpretation can arise. Many of the most significant of the recov¬ered objects have been found in tombs.
The burial rites of many ancient communities required that grave goods be interred with the deceased, but the extent to which tombs and grave goods reflect the organization of society is controversial. Some burials, for example, are richer than others in the same cemetery, and the usual inference is that the deceased, in life, stood out in wealth and in status. In other cemeteries, burials may have been very similar in layout and in their con-tents. Here, scholars often suggest that the associated settlements had a more egalitarian social structure. Neither of these inferences is certain: burials are the remains of a burial rite, and fashion or belief may well have had more influence on deposits than other factors. At the same time, it is far from certain that all members of settlements received formal burials of the kind that have left detectable and datable traces in the archeological record. What survives, then, may be evidence for the practices of only a portion of the inhabitants of the towns and villages associated with a particular cemetery.
Votive deposits, another important category of evidence, provide similar problems in interpretation. In Italy and in much of the Mediterranean world, worshippers deposited objects in sacred places to fulfill a vow or to thank the presiding deity for favors. When these sanctuaries, shrines, caves, or groves became crowded with gifts, those in charge would make room by burying the offerings. Again, the finds primarily illuminate the range of objects deemed suitable as a gift to a god, although they may also reveal some¬thing about the kinds of objects available in the community and the techniques involved in their manufacture.