THE ITALIAN SETTLEMENTS
Archeological investigations provide the evidence for the history of Italy before the appearance of cities and organized states, because writing develops only as urban life was emerging. The material remains of ancient cultures can provide insights into important aspects of societies: how people organized and arranged their houses and their settlements; the ways they earned their living; the objects they made and how they used them; the commercial and cultural contacts they established with neighbors and with more distant peoples.
At first glance, more-over, the recovery of the physical traces of the lives of earlier inhabitants seems to avoid many of the problems associated with the interpretation of often biased and value-laden texts.
But archeological evidence also has its own limitations. Only a few activities leave clear physical traces, and the remains are often very difficult to date and to interpret. Archeologists, moreover, often restrict their investigations to a limited range of sites. Thus, tombs and monumental public buildings for long received more attention than ordinary houses or settlements. Archeologists now often focus more on settlements and houses, and they regularly employ surface surveys involving the systematic examination of traces on the surface left by centuries of human use to learn more about settlement patterns. At the same time, in order to shed light on the environment and the economy, excavators have sought to recover plant and animal remains and to subject them to increasingly sophisticated analysis. Yet there are limits to these approaches.
Much of life remains inac-cessible. Excavations and surveys usually reveal more about a society’s technology, settlement patterns, and economy than they do about the events that shaped the inhabitants of a community, about the political and social institutions and practices that organized their lives, and about the system of beliefs that guided relationships with neighbors, family members, rulers, and ruled. This necessary emphasis on the material, technical, and economic aspects of communities has a further, and important, consequence. Archeologists often identify “cultures” on the basis of a number of shared traits, practices, and forms in funerary rites, in technology, in material goods, and in economic life; but these archeological cultures should not be confused with cultures defined through other means.