Communicating Identity in Italic Iron Age Communities

By Margarita Gleba

Recent archaeological work has shown that South Italy was densely occupied at least from the Late Bronze Age, with a marked process of the development of proto-urban centres, accompanied by important technological transformations. The archaeological exploration of indigenous South Italy is a relatively recent phenomenon, thanks to the bias towards the study of Greek colonies. Therefore an assessment of processes taking place in Italic Iron Age communities is well overdue. Communicating Identity explores the many and much varied identities of the Italic peoples of the Iron Age, and how specific objects, places and ideas might have been involved in generating, mediating and communicating these identities. The term identity here covers both the personal identities of the individuals as well and the identities of groups on various levels (political, social, gender, ethnic or religious). A wide range of evidence is discussed including funerary iconography, grave offerings, pottery, vase-painting, coins, spindles and distaffs and the excavation of settlements. The methodologies used here have wider implications. The situation in the northern Black Sea region in particular has often been compared to that of southern Italy and several of the contributions compare and contrast the archaeological evidence of the two regions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Jun 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781842176368

Book preview

Introduction

Communicating Identity in Italic Iron Age Communities – and Beyond

Jean MacIntosh Turfa

Some scholars find the roots of modern culture (via Rome and medieval Europe, to be sure) in Iron Age Italy: even the healthful ‘Mediterranean diet’ popular today has been traced to pre- and protohistoric Italian antecedents. Likewise, in clothing, costume, and the materials thereof (textiles), as in social conventions and religious traditions, especially votive religion and funerary ritual, we may discern the ancestry of early Italy. Literacy, while an example of the cultural enrichment that the Italian archipelago so avidly received from Eastern visitors and settlers, almost immediately formed an essential trait of Italian culture, in non-Indo-European Etruria and the Italic regions, as well as the great mixed-ethnic colonial enclaves like Pithekoussai.

Culture, both material and metaphysical, is the product equally of men and women, and we may study the unique identity and proud developments of Italian (meaning both Etruscan and Italic) society in the work of the women who gave birth to and clothed every member of it, just as they prepared loved ones for burial and the afterlife. Thanks to new techniques for identifying the organic materials and technology of ‘women’s work’ – textile manufacture – we may begin to fathom the impact of their identity and beliefs (Gleba). Because of sophisticated analysis of newly accessible works of art such as Venetic and Daunian stelai (Lomas, Norman), it is becoming possible to ‘read’ their complex messages of family, tribe and universe.

Men’s skills have traditionally been proclaimed in the worlds of war and statecraft, and several authors have pointed to symbolic expressions of, and modes for reinforcing, the institutions of elite rule: Gualtieri directs us to the rare find of a herald’s state-issued caduceus in a native settlement, while the painstaking analysis of Crielaard and Burgers gives us a picture of life in the town of L’Amastuola, caught between local warlords and Greek invaders, yet never surrendering its own identity or political system. The family home, also studied in settlements excavated in Sicily (Kistler, Fitzjohn), betrays a strong sense of identity, learned even by children through the patterns and processes of building and maintenance. An appraisal of native and imported Greek pottery (Handberg and Jacobsen) reveals contrasting systems in the Black Sea and in Italy, where Greek craftsmen were integrated into communities like Francavilla Marittima generations before any Greek colony ships appeared on the horizon.

One’s identity becomes especially important in death, and while a mere inventory of grave offerings may not be sufficient to proclaim ethnicity (Shepherd), late Archaic and Classical funerary representations (and also omissions) show subtle modes of proclaiming personal identity, as with the priestess of the community at Roccagloriosa (Fracchia), or the man memorialized by the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum (Robinson). Orphic cult was embraced by some, but not all, of the societies exposed to it by colonial Greeks, and again, responses differed radically in the other colonial realm of the Black Sea (Petersen).

In the later centuries of pre-Roman Italy, we see Greek coinage and iconographic systems manipulated even by native cities so small that we no longer know their names (Horsnæs), and other cities, like Corfinium, re-casting themselves as virtual constructs in opposition to the heavy-handed, material citizenship of Rome (Isayev). Even into the period of Rome’s empire, native Italic and Etruscan identity, whether satirized by humorists and poets, or embraced by politicians and emperors (Farney), remained an essential aspect of daily life. The manifestations and manipulations of Italic identity are truly variegated, but the strength of each individual’s and community’s view of self and world cannot be challenged.

The articles in this volume present new findings from excavations and the scholars’ own research, each with a brief background on their topic; they range in time from the Late Bronze Age (12th century BC) to the Late Republican period (1st century BC).

In an article dense with new or newly organized information, Lomas reaffirms the indigenous identity and iconography of the Iron Age stelai of northern Italy, often poorly appreciated in the past due to facile comparisons with Greek art. Two corpora of funerary images from the Venetic region, differentiated by city of origin (Este or Padua), and enriched by inscriptions, offer a diachronic view from the 6th century BC through the Augustan period. Paduan stelai assimilated, but were never dominated by, Etruscan, Celtic and eventually Roman elements. Although urbanization began in the 8th century in this region, the appearance of such funerary monuments only appears with the subsequent development of a steeper social hierarchy in the 6th century BC. The family may be the relevant entity, as most stelai relate to family plots rather than individual tombs. From this time on the stelai express a strong sense of ethnos and the social differences between neighboring Este and Padua appear quite distinct. Formulaic scenes on the stelai need not be read in the same vein as Etruscan funerary-travel scenes; the interest in horses relates to a deeper, Venetic association with the elite. Over time, the themes of the stelai, the costumes and inscriptions, express changes in the lives of communities, including the shock of the Gallic invasion and the more gradual Romanization of the region. The quintessentially Venetic, high office of ekupetaris, still problematic of interpretation, is notably commemorated in some stelai.

Gleba brings a voice to the world of women often overlooked in past studies because of the poor preservation of their crafts, especially textiles. She presents material evidence for a broadly defined, gender-factored pan-Italian aristocratic koine in the 8th and 7th centuries BC, in which women’s most common implements, spindles and distaffs, were recognized as emblematic of their status in family and community. Elite women developed more elaborate markers in symbolic – and impractical – versions of textile utensils made in precious materials. Some spinning equipment, both useful and symbolic, may be traced to distant workshops (e.g. Bologna/Felsina) and these items, especially bronze hand-held distaffs, were probably also indicators of these women’s ethnic origins outside the communities in which they were ultimately buried.

Norman’s novel interpretation of the expression of identity through the ornamentation of Daunian stelai forms a counterpoint to the analyses of northern monumental traditions (Lomas). She argues that these are the only extant self-representational art of this culture, and that the narrative scenes carved on many stelai actually depict a scene from the ceremonial life of elite Daunian society, a procession and display or offering of weaving implements and textiles, enacted by the elaborately costumed, elite women whom the stelai commemorate. In outline, each stele is an abstract, clothed female form: the faceless format was probably meant to invoke not individuals but families or other groups. The Daunian procession may allude to both a wedding ceremony and a religious or funerary occasion in which textiles and the bride’s skill at weaving are symbols of the family’s status, and society’s true wealth.

Italian migration into Paestum and the nativization of Paestan culture was a thorough and gradual process occurring well before the Samnite influx known to historians. Robinson’s argument, supported by diverse types of evidence, is that clues to the ethnic identity of the man interred in the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum were deliberately embedded in the painted walls that surrounded him. The distinctive vase that forms a focus to the symposium scene is an example of ethnic self-definition through material culture. The choice of vases with a long background of native antecedents, like the nestoris, was a non-controversial means of stating that the owners, while affluent, were emphatically not Greek.

One particularly rich chamber tomb, Tomb 24 at Roccagloriosa, may be read as emblematic of the social situation prevailing in western Lucania around the 4th century BC. Familial groupings in the necropolis appear to be distinctive of Lucanian society in the period prior to Romanization, and Fracchia maintains that the iconography of Apulian painted vases was deliberately selected for its social and religious meanings either by the occupant of Tomb 24 (a middle-aged woman) or her family. A neck-amphora with the story of Niobe expresses deep familiarity with Greek mythology (and thus identification with Greek culture) as well as aspects of the woman’s life (probably loss of sons). Greek myth was intentionally chosen to underline the status of the Italic elite. The remarkable absence of jewelry implies that this woman enjoyed status on a level higher than that of a family, whose prerogative it was to bestow such offerings, while the presence of a sacrificial knife, bronze phiale and miniature olla, as known in other Italic contexts, probably signal that she was a priestess. Shrines in houses of various economic levels at Roccagloriosa also attest to the importance of indigenous religious traditions.

The daily lives of Lucanian men, who would have viewed themselves as citizens, were marked by the practice and accoutrements of government. Gualtieri suggests that the Lucanians chose Greek international culture and language for their self-representation in diplomatic relations with the wider world, as evidenced through the find at the settlement of Roccagloriosa of a kerykeion, a herald’s staff, inscribed in Greek, with the acronym for demosion. A high level of social and political, i.e. urban, complexity was enjoyed in the Lucanian fortified hilltop towns by the later 4th century BC, as recognized in the public buildings erected at Roccagloriosa. This was soon to be followed by states’ publicly posted inscriptions like the bronze tabula inscribed in Oscan naming magistrates (meddes) and an assembly.

The development of a mixed culture with Greek and native elements in the region of Taranto is finely illustrated through the fortified hilltop site of L’Amastuola, as surveyed by its excavators, Crielaard and Burgers. They make a cogent case for a ‘fuzzy’ or more complex situation operating at the time of so-called first-contact between Greek colonists and natives – namely, that there was already familiarity between peoples, and that society in the area eventually colonized by Greeks was already following complicated patterns of interaction with near and distant neighbors. In other words, until the 5th century BC, there was much more middle-ground and much less identification with ethnic categories than either modern commentators or ancient historians recognized. 8th-century fortifications and a 7th-century destruction event show responses to indigenous aggression; successive remodeling of the town until its 3rd-century BC abandonment shows sophisticated structures and goods in a population cognizant of, but never overwhelmed by, Greek developments. It seems that at L’Amastuola allegiance was always to the community rather than to some general concept of fellow-ethnics, and certainly not to Greek overlords in Taras.

While some objects functioned as signals of identity across the Italic societies, Shepherd challenges the suggestion that we can detect hybrid customs in such phenomena as burials in the Greek colonial areas of Sicily. Building upon fibulae as unreliable indicators of ethnicity and gender in native and colonial Greek burials, she analyzes certain types of unusual burials that have at times been proposed as examples of the middle-ground mingling of native (Sikel) and Greek funerary traditions, finding that they do not really prove such hybridity. The adaptation of Greek elements into native customs probably occurred because, prior to colonial contact, Sikel culture and religion were aniconic and deliberately transformed themselves when stimulated by Greek contact. The visibly hybrid culture only appears in the later 7th or 6th centuries BC, generations after the original colonization experience, and thus when the Greeks and Sikels were already no strangers to each other and the borrowing was a conscious maneuver to assert an elite identity, something intelligible to both Greek and Sikel alike.

Contact with the outside world (Greeks and Phoenicians) would become the defining factor in the identity of Iron Age Italic societies, but housing patterns demonstrate that the processes of social and political evolution were already in full swing before foreign immigrants appeared. Kistler argues for interpretation of social systems according to the type and arrangement of their housing units, a technique that has been applied with success in modern ethnographic studies. It is relatively simple to differentiate Greek colonists from Sicilian indigenes according to their construction of houses or huts, but the arrangement of structures actually expressed more sophisticated social systems. Extended family compounds (of huts of all shapes and uses) characterized native, pre-Greek settlements; burial of multiple family members in rock-cut chambers emphasized their cooperative efforts and cohesion. In the Late Bronze Age site of Mokarta (12th-10th century BC) communal food stores represent hierarchical control by certain family members. A pre-Greek settlement at Menfi, near Selinunte, although short-lived (late 8th-mid-7th century BC), had communal benches and cult areas for sacrifice and feasting. At Polizzello (near Agrigento) a 6th century settlement with ‘acropolis’ and lower town had a large meeting-house for periodic feasts, while families lived in houses in neighborhoods rather than sprawling compounds. Finally, the house-society gave way to a proto-urban system behind town walls, with large families compressed into single, large houses.

While Kistler analyzed patterns of aggregation of houses from an ethnographic viewpoint, Fitzjohn has chosen to view the house as an expression of social identity, emphatically reinforced by the very process of its construction, which involved many members of the community in different ways, according to their native or Greek backgrounds. All-told, a single hut would require perhaps hundreds of man-days, the participation of experts in woodworking and other crafts, and intensive planning to dovetail these activities with food-production and the agricultural, seasonal year. Some tasks would have involved children and others for whom the process was part of identity-building, as it was an exercise in community cohesion for all. The multi-room houses cut into hillsides by the early colonists appear to be a hybrid of native and Greek traditions, but, as the most comfortable system for that region, really attest to the freedom of early residents in expressing identity.

The occurrence of native or hand-made pottery in Greek colonial settlements has, in the view of Handberg and Jacobsen, prompted two different approaches to interpretation. For Italy, there is a growing consensus of a Middle Ground, namely that Greek immigrants frequently cohabited with natives, who continued to make or purvey their distinctive impasto and matt-painted wares even when Greek fine-wares were available. Evidence comes from Francavilla Marittima (near Sybaris) and Incoronata (near Metapontion), but indigenous pottery appears at all Greek settlements in southern Italy. At Francavilla, contact with Greeks flourished perhaps 50 years before the Greek colony was founded, as natives worked alongside Euboean-trained craftsmen in an 8th-century BC potters’ quarter. Dugout-type houses (cf. Fitzjohn) which could be interpreted as indigenous forms in Italy/Sicily, tend to be read as a comfortable compromise between Greek and native. Black-Sea scholars, in contrast, do not accept dugout houses or the presence of Scythian or Taurian ceramics as evidence of a mixed population at Berezan, Olbia, or Chersonesos.

The development and spread of the doctrine of Orphism during the late 6th–5th centuries BC in two quite disparate regions, the Black Sea and southern Italy, clearly depended upon the penetration of Greek colonists into these areas, but the differing conditions, and the different mix of indigenous residents led to slightly different modes of expression. According to Petersen, the character of funerary rituals in both regions indicates societies under stress from their intensive contacts with alien cultures and the settlers’ attempts to deal with a new world. At Olbia, a mirror with Orphic inscription was buried in a woman’s tomb, and a set of bone plaques inscribed "bios-thanatos-bios" were found in the Central Temenos. The epigraphic and artistic evidence of Orphism is much greater in southern Italy, with such famous finds as the late-5th-4th century gold tablet buried with a young girl at Hipponion. The contrasting lack of such finds in Tarentine burials, in conjunction with the area’s less assertive indigenous population, implies that the Greek citizens there felt no serious threat.

Recent developments in numismatic scholarship (and archaeological detection) have enhanced our understanding of the indigenous coinages of early Italy, and furnish material for interpretations of native identity. Horsnæs shows that brief spates of hectic minting were punctuated by long periods without any new issues. Weight standards relate to Greek colonial networks, not surprisingly, but the bull depicted on many mint-on-demand issues of southern Italy, though inspired by the coinage of Sybaris, has been reinvented for Italic purposes. Although the cities/communities of origin are not established for these distinctive issues, they show that native groups could put Greek art and economics (and probably Greek artisans) to work for their own expression.

Roman legislation linked citizenship with membership in a specific place, often willingly commemorated by traditionally recorded civic works patronage in the municipium, but even before this phenomenon there was Italic conceptual identity. Isayev reads the concept of place, the abstract approach to the physicality of space, as an expression of identity for cultural or political groups, and examines the site of Corfinium, established in the central Apennines as the capitol of the Socii in their war with Rome (91–87 BC). Re-named Italica and portrayed as a caput imperii, the new place was designed to foster a sense of common identity among the disparate groups of families and soldiers gathered there. Corfinium was a sort of virtual capitol, a construct in people’s minds, completely different from any of its local historical predecessors: it thus conflicted with none except Rome.

Farney’s appraisal of attitudes in 1st-century (and later) Rome finds that, by the early empire, the ethnic groups of Italy had become totally immersed in the common culture of Roman identity. In losing negative stereotypes and (re-)acquiring civic power through Roman citizenship, they did not entirely surrender Italic or Etruscan identity, however, for numerous aspects of the old culture were absorbed by Rome, including nomenclature (for which there is much epigraphic evidence), religious traditions (cited in many literary sources), and linguistic traits. Old-fashioned frugality and morality became ideals attributed to the Apennine peoples and appreciated by Rome, while senators and emperors for centuries would make much of a presumed Italian origin.

Identity and social change through the 1st millennium BC and across the Italian archipelago (and beyond, to the Black Sea) cannot yet be thoroughly understood: we still must rely on art and archaeological contexts, on epigraphy and scant literary references to estimate what people really thought and believed. The specialist studies presented here constitute new series of data to be grafted into that picture.

We see that women had much in common no matter what their ethnicity, while even in death, few families could transcend the restraints of their group’s social hierarchy. Still, many individuals silently encoded family and tribal ties into funerary art, leaving messages for those who can read them. Men’s lives are more often reflected in the art of war or representations of political status: natives may have embraced hellenized forms of public life, yet they did so without surrendering their own self-image. Houses in the towns were of course homes, and we may read social organization and values in their construction and planning.

Many Italic villages developed hellenized traditions not at sword point but through easy familiarity with Greek immigrant craftsmen and merchants adopted into their communities long before colonization reached their land. Writing and narrative art were among the Greeks’ gifts, but when employed by natives (even after centuries of development) they expressed a unique hybrid identity rather than wholesale submersion of indigenous traits.

When the Italic communities came to deal with Rome’s rise – and designs upon their autonomy – new modes of coinage, public works sponsorship, and the nomenclature of cities and towns, and of the families and men with new roles, reflected not merely their Roman upgrades, but demonstrated a tenacious pride in centuries of ethnic heritage. Structures may be simple or complex and historical events dramatic, but each person participating in them held no doubts about who he or she was.

1

Communicating Identities in Funerary Iconography: the Inscribed Stelae of Northern Italy

Kathryn Lomas

Inscribed and/or iconographic funerary monuments provide an important insight into cultural identities and their representation at a number of different levels. They have an important role in communicating the status and identity of an individual or family, but they also communicate a wider range of cultural identities. This paper will focus on inscribed grave monuments from the Veneto. These artefacts, dating from the 6th century BC to the Augustan period, include rare examples of inscribed objects from the region which also carry iconographic decoration, and therefore allow an integrated study of writing and iconography. The multiplicity of cultural influences discernible in them provides a context in which to study the interaction of the local Venetic elite with various different cultures. Past studies of these artefacts have focused on external influences and examined them as studies in Hellenisation or Etruscanisation. Relatively few have examined the writing and the iconography as a package or considered the artefacts in their own terms as representations of Venetic identity. In fact, they demonstrate the ways in which writing and iconography could be manipulated as representations of group and personal identity, and the ways in which these changed in response to various external cultural influences, but within the context of the identity of the Venetic elite.

This paper will examine the ethnic and cultural interactions, and the development of different types of self-definition and identity in early Italy, using one particularly complex region – the Veneto – as a case-study. Its pivotal position at the head of the Adriatic meant that it was a region of contact not just with other important Italian cultures such as the Etruscans, and later Rome, but also with Greeks, both from Greece itself and from Greek settlements along the Adriatic coast of Italy. It also came into contact with the cultures of Europe north of the Alps, both via long established trade routes and migration of Celtic populations into the region in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC (Plin. HN 20, 119–120; Prosdocimi 1991; Capuis 1993, 188–197, 197–209; Capuis 2001; Williams 2001, 100–138). It therefore forms an area of intense cultural and economic contact. It also has a rich and distinctive material culture of its own, which absorbed elements of the various other cultures it came into contact with but very much on its own terms. This is particularly illustrated by a group of funerary monuments from Padua which show a complex interaction of different cultural elements, but which nevertheless conveyed a powerful local identity, from the 6th century BC until well into the period of Romanisation.

It is probably self-evident to say that the formation and maintenance of ethnic and cultural identities, particularly in areas of intense cultural contact, are highly complex processes, and arriving at an understanding of how they worked in an ancient society for which we have only partial evidence compounds the problem. One of the problematic areas is in deciding what sort of group identities are evolving. There is strong evidence for the early emergence of urban centres and strong state identities as the primary form of social, political and cultural identity in most of the Veneto, but there are big differences in this between the north and south of the region, and evidence for an over-arching ethnic identity or sense of Venetic identity is much less clear-cut. From the 8th century BC, developments at or near key sites such as Padua, Este, Vicenza, Treviso and Altino include: growth in size of settlements and a steeper hierarchy of sites, especially from the end of the 7th century BC; the first signs of activity on most major ritual sites; and richer burials and more complex layout of cemeteries and settlements. These developments are, however, concentrated in the lowland areas of the Veneto around the centres of Este, Padua, Vicenza and Altino (Fig. 1.1; Chieco Bianchi 1981, 49–53; Capuis and Chieco Bianchi 1992, 45–51; Capuis 1993, 114–121, 163–5; Boaro 2001, 154–163; Balista, Gambacurta and Ruta Serafini 2002, 105–126). From the 7th–5th centuries BC, complex settlements with associated sanctuaries continued to develop rapidly in the S. Veneto and develop features characteristic of urbanisation, such as existence of organised street layout, public buildings, evidence for economic complexity, a steeper social hierarchy and complex settlement patterns in surrounding territory (Capuis 1993, 114–139; Balista and Ruta Serafini 1992; Boaro 2001; Balista, Gambacurta and Ruta Serafini 2002). At Este and Padua, the best documented sites, clusters of houses were ringed by areas of burials and strategically-placed religious sanctuaries, which mark the edge of the urban area and the boundaries of the territory. A steeper social hierarchy from the 6th century BC onwards is indicated by wealthy burials containing grave goods connected with feasting and drinking. The layout of cemeteries suggests that family/clan groupings were important, although little is known about political organisations. The process of growth and nucleation continues in the 4th-2nd centuries BC, a period marked by intensive contact with Greeks, Etruscans and Celts, and culminates in the development of Roman-style urban structures and layout in the 2nd–1st centuries BC (Bosio 1981, 231–237; Baggio Bernardoni 1992, 305–320; Tosi 1992, 400–418).

Figure 1.1. The Ancient Veneto. Key settlements.

One striking feature of this process of urbanisation, however, is that there are strong local differences, especially between the two neighbouring but competing centres of Padua and Este, in the details of urban layout and organisation, forms of funerary commemoration and material culture, and other cultural indicators such as the form of alphabet used for writing in Venetic. This strongly suggests that the primary form of group identity is that of the individual state, rather than the ethnos as a whole, and the fact that cultural differences are emphasised most strongly in the two cities which are most powerful and also adjacent to each other suggests that this is reinforced by processes of competition and peer polity interaction (Boaro 2001; Lomas forthcoming). Despite the fact that archaeological evidence and material culture points to strong local state identities based on urban settlements, the Greek and Roman sources depict the Veneti as a tribal, ethnically-based society¹ There is, however, very little evidence to suggest that the primary identity of the Veneti was that of a tribal ethnos and much to suggest that it was a region of emerging state societies in the 6th–3rd centuries BC.²

The Venetic funerary monuments

The funerary monuments from the region provide us with important evidence for the representation of cultural identities on both a personal/familial and a communal level, and for the interaction of different cultural elements within the Veneto. Almost all our data comes from the southern part of the region, and in particular from Este and Padua, but these two communities developed very different traditions of funerary commemoration from the 6th century BC onwards. At Este and its territory, grave markers take the form of a plain cippus of local limestone, usually with a slightly tapering shape, and incised with a short inscription in the local language and script (Fig. 1.2). Many examples have a chunk of unworked stone at the base, suggesting they were meant to be set upright in the ground. Relatively few have been found in situ, but the locations of those which come from an excavated context appear to mark groups of burials (probably family groups) rather than individual graves.³ The inscriptions take the form of a first person inscription with a personal name, as is common in Etruria and northern Italy.⁴

Elsewhere in the southern Veneto, the predominant form of commemoration is a rectangular stele, also of local limestone. Most surviving examples come from Padua or its territory, although there are a small number from elsewhere.⁵ The upper part of these stelae is delimited by an incised or carved border framing a square or rectangular ground. In the majority of examples, this is filled with carving – either incised or in low relief – depicting a formulaic scene, although in some cases it is left blank or contains only an abstract symbol. Many have traces of an inscription in the Paduan form of the Venetic alphabet around the edge, although some are illegible or doubtful because of damage to the stone (Fogolari 1970–71, 3–4).⁶ The distribution of these two types of grave marker, with the cippus type restricted to Este and its territory, and the stele type clustered around Padua, suggests a strong emphasis on local tradition and on cultural differentiation between these two centres.

Figure 1.2. Grave marker. Este, 5th century BC (Lomas, after Pellegrini and Prosdocimi 1967, Es2).

These so-called stelae patavinae have a particularly long time-span, dating from the late 6th century BC to the Augustan period, and this gives a valuable opportunity to study the change and development of cultural identity over time. In addition, the multiplicity of cultural influences discernible in them provides a context in which to study the interaction of the local Venetic elite with various cultures. They represent an interesting case-study of the way in which writing and iconography could both be manipulated as representations of group and personal identity, and the ways in which these identities changed in response to various external cultural influences generated by contact with Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans. However, it is not helpful to view them as a manifestation of Hellenisation or any other external cultures. Although they undoubtedly show the influence of the wide range of cultural contacts to which the Venetic elite was exposed, they absorb these into an overall framework of Venetic identity, which proved remarkably stable and persistent.

There are currently 18 known stelae of this type, in various states of preservation, and all but two come from Padua. They range in date from the late 6th to the 1st century BC, although there is presently a gap in the sequence between the mid-3rd and 1st centuries BC. The dating, however, must be treated with caution as very few were found in datable archaeological contexts. The dating and chronology are primarily based on the style of decoration and on the letter-forms for those which had inscriptions.⁷ All of the items for which we have recorded locations were found in the area to the east of the main area of Venetic settlement at Padua. Both stray finds and more systematic excavation indicate that there was at least one major Venetic cemetery in this area, and several smaller nuclei of burials (Boaro 2001, 167–168; Michelini and Ruta Serafini 2005, 132–139). This is strong circumstantial evidence that these were originally grave markers, but few – if any – have been found in association with an actual burial.⁸ As a result, there is some considerable uncertainty about how these were intended to be displayed. Excavations at Este indicate that in the 6th-4th centuries BC, tombs were grouped together in what appear to be family or gentilicial groups. Each tomb group had its space demarcated by slabs of stone set upright in the ground, and may have been covered with a burial mound. The stone cippi which were used to mark the graves at Este may have marked the entrance to each of these groups (Fogolari 1988, 99–105; Prosdocimi 1988, 247–249; Balista and Ruta Serafini 1992). There is no evidence for how the Paduan stelae were displayed, but given the unworked bases and the elaborate nature of the artefacts it seems reasonable to assume that the early examples, at least, fulfilled much the same function, displayed outside the tomb to mark an elite burial or tomb group, and to display the status of its owner, or owners. It is less clear how the later examples – especially those dating to the 1st century BC – were displayed. These appear to have a plain base, although this may be due to later re-cutting of the stone, but it leaves open the possibility that the display context may have been different. However, the balance of probabilities is that most or all of the stelae were intended to be set up at or near a tomb or group of tombs.

The iconography

The iconography of the stelae is very formulaic, and confined (with a very few exceptions) to scenes of a chariot with passengers, or to mounted combat. The earliest example, found near Camin and dated by both the style of decoration and the letter-forms of the inscription to the late 6th century BC, is the most anomalous.⁹ Unlike the other stelae, it does not depict a chariot or mounted warrior (Fig. 1.3; Prosdocimi 1961–62, 722–724; Pellegrini and Prosdocimi 1967, Pa1; Fogolari 1988, 99–101). Instead, it shows a man and a woman, apparently greeting or taking leave of each other. The man wears a cloak and wide-brimmed beret and carries a staff, possibly denoting rank or a specific office, while the woman wears a tunic and a large shawl and holds out a bird. Both wear costumes found in contemporary Situla Art and characteristic of depictions of high-status individuals of that period. The pose, reaching out to each other, suggests a depicting of greeting or leave-taking. It has been suggested that the bird signifies the soul of the departed, or that it (and the scene in general) should be interpreted as that of an offering to the dead (Prosdocimi 1963–64; Fogolari 1970–71, 4–5).

If the two examples without iconographic decoration¹⁰ are excluded, the remainder fall approximately into three groups. The first group dates approximately to the 5th and 4th centuries BC, and includes Pa2, Pa3, Pa4, and stelae from Via S. Gregorio, Via Belzoni, and a number of unknown locations (Figs 1.4–1.10; Prosdocimi 1963–64; Pellegrini and Prosdocimi 1967, 328–336, 340–342; Marinetti 1983–85, 289–290; Prosdocimi 1988, 284–8; Zamperi 1986–87). Stelae of this group depict a chariot with a driver, and in some instances additional passengers. An early example from Via S. Gregorio (Fig. 1.5; Zampieri 1986–87) depicts a woman wearing a Venetic dress and a disc-shaped headdress standing in front of the chariot and its driver. The stele is badly worn and the upper and right parts are missing, but enough survives to show that the space around the chariot was occupied by several animals, including a bird and possibly a third, winged, horse above the chariot. Another (Fig. 1.6; Pellegrini and Prosdocimi 1967, Pa4), also very worn, depicts a chariot with a driver and female passenger, wearing the shawl and disc headdress, which are characteristic of elite Venetic women. The Albignasego stele (Fig. 1.7; Pellegrini and Prosdocimi 1967, Pa 3) depicts a chariot carrying a driver armed with a spear and passenger, who may be female although this identification is not entirely conclusive (Fogolari 1970–71, 8–9; Zampieri 1994, 109). The remainder depict a chariot with a driver only, mostly male and depicted as armed and wearing the wide-brimmed beret, which appears in Situla Art as a sign of high rank (Zaghetto 2007, 177). Only one example of a female chariot-driver is known (Fig. 1.8; Pa24: Prosdocimi 1988, 288). The figures are similar in style, dress and arms to those found in Situla Art, although some Celtic features may be identifiable in the details of some of the arms. The Albignasego stele, for instance, may depict a chariot of the celtic essedum type, and the warrior driving it carries a long Celtic-type shield (Prosdocimi 1964–65b, 263). The stelae include little additional decoration, although some include trees (Figs 1.4 and 1.9; Pa2, Pa3; Pellegrini and Prosdocimi 1967), while on others, the chariot is accompanied by a bird (Pa3) or a dog (Fig. 1.10; Via Belzoni stele, Zampieri 1994, 108).

Figure 1.3. Stele from Camin, Padua. 6th century BC. Padua, Musei Civici agli Eremitani.

Figure 1.4. Stele from Padua, 5th century BC (Lomas, after Pellegrini and Prosdocimi 1967, Pa2).

Figure 1.5. Stele from Via S. Gregorio, Padua, 5th century BC, Padua, Musei Civici agli Eremitani.

Figure 1.6. Stele from Padua, 5th century BC, Padua, Musei Civici agli Eremitani (Lapidario II).

Figure 1.7. Stele from Albignasego, Padua, 5th century BC, Padua, Musei Civici agli Eremitani.

Figure 1.8. Stele from Padua, 5th century BC, Padua, Musei Civici agli Eremitani.

Figure 1.9. Stele from Altichiero, Padua, 5th century BC, Padua, Musei Civici agli Eremitani.

The second group appears to be later, dating to the 4th–3rd centuries BC, and has a distinctly different iconography. The warrior and/or passengers travelling by chariot are replaced by scenes of mounted warriors in combat. An incised stele from the Via Acquette, probably of the 4th century BC, shows a galloping horseman, wearing a helmet and carrying a round shield and spear, which is levelled as if for combat (Fig. 1.11; Pellegrini and Prosdocimi 1967, Pa3 bis). A small bird flies above him in the right hand corner. The stelae from the Via Loredan are slightly later, probably dating to the late 4th–3rd centuries (Fogolari 1988, 103–104; Zampieri 1994, 108–109). The best preserved, Loredan II, is carved in low relief and shows a mounted warrior carrying a long shield and trampling a fallen enemy (Fig.1.12). A circular object in the lower left corner may represent the severed head of the defeated man (Fogolari 1970–71, 9–14; 1988, 103–104). Loredan I (Fig. 1.13) is of similar date and appears to be carved in higher relief in a Hellenising style, although it is badly damaged. The iconography, as far as can be seen, is very similar to that of Loredan II, depicting a mounted horseman trampling a fallen enemy (Fogolari 1970–71, 9–14; 1988, 103; Zampieri 1994, 108–109). A further example, also found on the Via Loredan and dating to the 3rd century BC, depicts a mounted warrior, apparently wearing Greek-style armour, although much of the upper part of the stele is missing (Prosdocimi 1963–64, 344–345). A number of elements in this group seem to indicate a greater diversity of influences in the culture of Padua at this