9 Social Networks, Path Dependence, and the Rise of Ethnic Groups in pre-Roman Italy

This chapter uses the evidence from west-central Italy, home to two of the peninsula's strongest regional groups before the rise of Rome — the Etruscans and the Latins — to demonstrate that the regional groups of the first millennium bce may be traced from earlier than previously thought, and were the outcome of intra-regional social networks in place by the Final Bronze Age or earlier. It proposes that these networks are visible archaeologically in the distribution of certain categories of easily traceable foreign objects, which will have circulated along the paths of the hypothesized networks, moving between sites (nodes). It begins by suggesting that social networks may be a better way to identify incipient regional groups than expressive actions of identity. It then discusses the methods for detecting these social networks through artefact distributions, and concludes with the west-central Italy case study.