Who can I be now? Creating community identities in pre-Roman Italy

The lecture, which will be given online via Zoom, is entitled Who can I be now? Creating community identities in pre-Roman Italy and all are welcome. 

Abstract

This lecture investigates the understanding of community identities in Italy in first millennium BC. Through a series of case-studies, mostly drawn from Southern and Central Italy, it seeks to interrogate: the definition of groups as “peoples” or “tribes” and the assumption of an ethnic-basis to community identities; the construction of group- and site-level identities; the problem of being reliant upon outsiders’ perspectives, such as those of Greek and Roman writers, on group identities; the behaviour of groups within the historical sources as political actors rather than cultural entities; wherein lay the principal locus of identity – the “tribal” level or that of the individual community; and the relationship between tribal or group names and material culture patterning. It is argued that community identities were always a construction that oftentimes involved the active selection or deselection of elements from a community’s heritage and history, and that this is not always sufficiently acknowledged by scholarship.

The Accordia lecture series is jointly sponsored by the Institute of Classical Studies (Institute of Advanced Study, University of London) and by the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

For any enquiries about the Accordia Lectures on Italy 2020-21 series, and to obtain relevant Zoom links, please contact Prof Ruth Whitehouse (accresearch20@gmail.com). 

Programme | Accordia Lectures on Italy 2020-21

• 20 October 2020: Who can I be now? Creating community identities in pre-Roman Italy (Edward Herring)
• 17 November 2020: Gian Francesco Abela: re-assessing the legacy of a 17th century antiquarian in Malta (Reuben Grima & Nicholas Vella)
• 8 December 2020: Production and consumption of textiles in pre-Roman Italy: archaeological evidence (Margarita Gleba)
• 19 January 2021: Toxic tombs with hegemonic husbands: reconsidering masculine identity in Archaic central Italy (Eóin O'Donoghue)
• 23 February 2021: Bodies in persistent places: another look at Nuragic figurines from Sardinia (Isabelle Vella Gregory)
• 16 March 2021: World War II in Sicily: protecting archaeology and museums under threat (Antonino Crisa)
• 11 May 2021: The relics that made Rome: a mythological–material approach to Rome’s legendary sacred objects, the pignora imperii (Eva Mol)
• 25 May 2021: Underwater archaeology in Sicily: a case study of in situ preservation (Rosanna Volpe)