Prehistoric Italy: A Summary

When speaking about history, archaeology, culture, ect., “prehistoric” refers to the times/places beyond or before written historical records. In an Ancient European context, “historic” generally means cultures the Greeks and Romans wrote about, including their own. In Italy, the Romans didn’t start writing about their own past until relatively late in the game. Thus Roman writers and poets took many creative liberties with filling in the gaps of what they knew about their own history. Greek accounts do tell us about some of the peoples of ancient Italy they encountered as they explored the region and settled the southern part of the peninsula.

Prior to the spread of farming and herding throughout Europe, there were various hunter-gatherer cultures. With regard to Western and Central Europe, archeogeneticists today refer to these populations as Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG). The I2a Y-haplogroup is one of the most common male lineages found among WHGs and has survived over the millennia into modern European peoples. About 10,000 – 5,000 years ago, farmers and herders from the Middle East (primarily from Anatolia) started migrating into Europe in successive waves. These Neolithic newcomers split into two main groups, (1) a south group that traveled along the Mediterranean Littoral, eventually reaching Iberia and North Africa; and (2) a north group that entered the interior of Europe via the Danube river valley and gradually made their way through the dense forests of Central and Western Europe, all the way to the Atlantic coast. Archeogeneticists today refer to these populations as Early European Farmers (EEF). Starting around 5000 years ago there was a massive invasion of peoples from the Pontic/Caspian Steppe region into the interior of Europe. These were warlike pastoralists (primarily cowherders) who had developed military technology vastly superior to most of the peoples they encountered on their rude travels. These Steppe nomads, Western Steppe Herders (WSH), likely spoke the earliest Indo-European languages (IE), which they spread wherever they set foot.



The ancestral Italic language was likely the first form of IE speech in Italy. It was probably pastoralists from maybe the upper Balkans or Carpathian region who brought archaic Italic speech into the Italian peninsula; perhaps beginning around 2000 BCE. Their speech seems to have branched off from the same ancestral IE dialect that produced proto-Celtic. The first Italics were cattle herders and would have encountered sedentary peoples, i.e. Neolithic farmers (EEF + WHG mix), who had already been there for quite some time. Over time these peoples mixed, and by the Early Roman Republic period, genetic studies today tell us that the average person from Central Italy had an ancestry that was roughly 30% Steppe in origin, and 70% EEF + WHG. The modern population of Sardinia is perhaps the best genetic preservation of what the pre-IE peoples of Italy looked like, as their Steppe ancesty is the lowest among all modern Europeans; they have practically none of it.

This is a very brief summary, and primarily from a genetic and ethno-linguistic perspective. The Wiki (FWIW) article gives a ton more detail for anyone who is interested in delving deeper; be warned though, that the “scholarly consensus” these article defer to is constantly in flux and often subject to the sort of fad-based groupthink that dominates academic circles in the current era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Italy

Notable Peoples Ancient Italy: Late Bronze and Early Iron Age.

Polada Culture: The Bronze Age farmers of Northern Italy; their orgins likely stem from people who migrated (via the Alps) c. 2200 BCE from Southern Germany and Austria into the modern-day territories of Lombardy, Trentino, and Veneto. These farmers were skilled metallurgists and lived in pile dwellings, typically near lakesides and marshes. They may have fled their original homelands due to the rapid spread of the Bell Beaker (Western IE) culture further north. If this is the case then they probably would have spoken non-IE languages and had limited-to-no Steppe admixture. Or perhaps this culture was a cluster of different ethno-lingusitic groups that happened to have shared a similar material culture. If the later is the case then maybe some Polada groups were IE-speaking.


Pile dwelling replicas. BTW, who would want to live on a swamp?

Appenine Pastoralists: My best guess here is that the first Italic groups were associated with the Apennine cultural complex of Bronze Age Central and Southern Italy. These would have been cattle herders who led a very simple and rudimentary existence. Their religion would have been mostly animistic and featured the preservation of many very old IE deity names. Both the animism and IE deity names survived into the Roman period. Now did these herders mingle and integrate with the previous inhabitants (EEF + WHG farmers) in a forceful or peaceful manner? We don’t really know, though the R1b male lineages (most common among Western IE peoples) tend to stand out the most in modern Italians. So I think we can say there was a widespread replacement of male lines, though many of other male lineages remained in significant numbers, it wasn’t one of those “the invaders killed all the males” scenarios that seemed to have been a lot more common north of the Alps. In the historic period, the Greeks and Romans grouped the various Italic groups into distinct regional-ethnic categories like Latins, Umbrians, Oscans, Sicels, and Venetics. Of course the Romans owe their origins to one of the Latin tribes.

Terramare Culture: The most notable culture of the Bronze Age Po Valley (Padana) region, and probably an offshoot of the above-mentioned Polada. They lived primarily in marshy and lakeside areas, as evidenced by the pile dwellings they lived in (again, like the Polada). Materially speaking (because that’s all archaeology can really look at), there seems to have been a close connection between the Terramare and contemporary peoples of the Alps and Southern Germany. Really, the ancient history of so-called “Northern Italy” is coterminous with that of Central Europe. On the question of how much of an ethno-lingustic connection this culture had with the broader Urnfield complex is an open debate and we’ll probably never know anything definitive on that. I would venture to guess that they may have been ancestors of the later Etruscan civilization, or at least they were one ancestral component of what was actually a complex composite population. This culture came to an abrupt end around 1200 BCE, which is the time period we generally know as “the Bronze Age Collapse.” It was a time when everything seemed to be going to complete crap all over the map.

Nuragic Civilization: i.e. Bronze Age Sardinia, est. around 1700 BCE, and lasted up until Roman colonization in the 3rd century BCE. Seemingly the height of material development of the EEF/Neolithic peoples of Southern Europe, the Nuragics were able to learn and absorb various Bronze Age technologies, while retaining their own culture and language(s). Their island location protected them from large-scale invasions and migration events, so these people were able to adapt to changing conditions on their own terms. By the late Bronze Age they were an advanced seafaring civilization, and may have been one of the infamous “Sea Peoples” the Egyptians talked about in their records around the time of the Bronze Age Collapse; probably the Sherden. The most distinguishing feature these peoples left behind was their conical tower fortress, the nuraghe. The ruins of more than 7000 of these towers dot the modern Sardinian landscape. It seems like a lot of really cool and unique folklore from the ancient culture has survived up to the present day. As mentioned above, modern Sardinians have the least amount of Steppe ancestry of all present-day European peoples. They really are an intact preservation of the ancient Mediterranean Neolithic Farmer (EEF) genetic profile.

Villanova Culture: were the people (who branched off from the Central European Urnfield Culture) that introduced iron-working to the Italian peninsula. They're what archaeologists generally consider to be the earliest phase of Etruscan civilization. Most of their archaeological sites are in Tuscany c. 900-700 BCE, though we also see some in Latium, Emile-Romagna, and even a few in Southern Italy. Their origins are clearly due to a large-scale migration from somewhere north of Tuscany. We see here a population that possesses military and settlement practices similar to that of the Hallstatt culture (proto-Celts) of contemporary Central Europe. They specifically chose steep plateaus and flat hilltops for their primary town sites and fortified the heck out of them, once established. In other words, they had defense on the brain, which suggests they did not enter Central Italy in a very peaceful manner.


Eyyyyy, just here to protect your hills and plateaus for you, nothing to worry about.

So this group seems “very Indo-European” as far as its MO is concerned. But here’s the twist, the historical culture the Villanova peoples would evolve into, spoke a decidedly-non-IE language, i.e. Etruscan. The origins of the Etruscans have baffled historians from classical antiquity and the modern era alike. There have been lots of differing theories, opinions, and conjectures on the origin of the Etruscans, but that is beyond the scope of this summary. If I ever do a detailed look at the Etruscans, I’ll touch on that matter. The main point here is that the Villanova culture was THE culture of Iron Age Italy. The Etruscans and Romans (among other contemporary Italics) alike can thank their existence to them.

One final point is that recent historical genetics studies show that the Italic Latins and Etruscans of the late Iron Age were the same exact race of people, genetically speaking. Despite their very different languages, it would have likely been impossible to tell a Latin and Etruscan apart just by looking at physical appearance (unaided by clothing and jewelry, of course). On top of that, after the Roman Republic went into conquest-overdrive and gobbled up all of Italy, the Etruscans quickly assimilated into Roman culture, and it’s likely that many of the notable plebeian gens of Republican Rome were of Etruscan origin. The more advanced Roman priestly practices almost entirely come from the Etruscans, but that is whole different topic for a different time.