THE VILLANOVIAN PERIOD
In their internal organization, these new and larger settlements still remained relatively simple, consisting of clusters of huts separated by small open spaces. Each of the smaller clusters that together made up the whole may have represented a kinship group or the inhabitants of an earlier, now abandoned village. Settlements often had several cemeteries, each used by a single cluster of huts or by a few neighboring groups, a sign that they perceived some common identity. Farming and the raising of pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats remained the primary economic activities. The absence of the potter’s wheel probably shows that the manufacture of pottery had yet to develop as an occupational specialty. Metal work, on the other hand, plainly was a matter for specialists who performed their functions beyond their own and neighboring villages. Since these settlements show no sign of elaborate social systems or clearly identifiable distinctions in wealth, let alone of formal layouts and public buildings (all marks of the cities that would emerge in the eighth and seventh centuries), they are best character¬ized as “proto-urban,” rather than as “urban”.
Placed between Villanovan Etruria and Campania, Latium developed its own regional culture around 1000. This “Latial culture” was once seen as a variant of Proto-Villanovan and Villanovan, and it shares many features with them. For the most part, Latin settlements were located on hills or on spurs that projected from the Apennines into the plain. Iron Age settlements in Latium generally were smaller than their counterparts in Etruria. The cluster of villages occupying the future site of the Latin city of Gabii offers the most detailed picture of a Latin set-tlement of the ninth and early eighth centuries. Gabii was on a narrow isthmus separating two small lakes. Before the formation of the city, a cluster of small settlements filled the isthmus and part of the rim of the northern lake; cemeteries were located at each end of the settled zone. In all likelihood, no village in Latium ever had more than one hundred inhabitants at any point during the ninth century. After about 800, however, a number of settlements there, like their Villanovan neighbors, began to grow larger because of internal growth and the abandonment of outlying villages. For the ninth and early eighth centuries, the burials at Gabii provide some evidence for the social order of a Latin settlement. Graves in its two cemeteries were arranged by rite and by the age and gender of the occupant. Adult men lie at the center; here cremation was the exclusive rite in one cemetery and the dominant practice in the other. Around the center were situated the graves of women and of young men; here, inhumation was the dominant practice.