War, Mobility and Empty Hillforts: Reshaping Narratives on Samnite Society beyond Urbanism (20 min)

Presenters

Giacomo Fontana, Institute of Archaeology, University College London (UCL)

Abstract

The role of cities in our modern society shapes our view of the possible ways past communities organized themselves. However, not all complex societies revolved around cities, even in the heavily urbanized Mediterranean region. One such example is the Samnites, a nonurban society that inhabited the Apennine region of south-central Italy in the first millennium B.C.E. Despite their organization being noticeably different from urban neighbors, they exhibited unusual social, political, and military resistance to the emerging Roman Republic that scholars still struggle to explain. For a long time, the narrative on the Samnites has been biased by urban-centric and historiographical views that rendered material evidence subservient to aprioristic models. When archaeological research recognized the fallacy of the dominant narrative, it failed to embrace global debates on hillfort communities, stagnating in regional myopia.

This presentation deconstructs modern assumptions by taking a quantitative approach to investigate the complex phenomenon of nonurban organization. Drawing from recent global debates on hillfort communities, it develops a transferable approach integrating extensive fieldwork with spatial and nonspatial computational modeling to address debates on the nature of Samnite hillforts and the society that constructed them.

This original approach highlights the role of mobility in shaping Samnite sociopolitical organization. This led to the emergence of large and monumental settlements, which were, however, occupied only seasonally, acting as arenas for power negotiation within a more heterarchical society. These settlements diverge from contemporary urban models, instead sharing similarities with broader settlement trajectories observed elsewhere in Europe and beyond. Within this framework, the period of war with Rome acted as a catalyst for sociopolitical change, leading to a rapid increase in political centralization and state formation, despite the absence of urbanism. The findings prompt a reevaluation of other Mediterranean societies that have been understood solely from an urban-centric perspective.