In this book, Seth Bernard investigates historical culture in Italy (including, but not exclusively focusing on, Rome) across five consecutive centuries and four historical periods, from the Early Iron Age (EIA) to the beginning of the Hellenistic period (900–300 BC). This is an innovative project: the question of “how local communities in early Italy thought and talked about their history” (p.1) has barely been raised before. Instead, scholarly debate has centred on the development of historical writing in Rome and the question of whether an Etruscan tradition of historical writing existed in this period. Influenced by the work of the American historical anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, the premise of Bernard’s book, laid out in Chapter 1, is the understanding that ‘historical culture’ can exist in societies that do not produce written narrative histories, and that it can be accessed via the archaeological record. This opens the door to the vast body of ancient material remains known from the many societies in ancient Italy that did not produce any written literature, or at least of which no written literature has survived. The task is to identify those objects and structures that were involved in ‘historical production’, and from there to deduce what kind of historical culture they were part of.

Working in a roughly chronological order, Chapter 2 presents aristocratic ancestors as foci of early Italian historical culture, traced through tomb clusters in EIA cemeteries across the Italian peninsula; orientalising monumental tomb architecture; the presence of ‘heirlooms’ in the grave-good assemblages of certain tombs; inscriptions identifying the names and genealogies of the deceased; and the presence of human figures that may be interpreted as representations of deceased ancestors, ranging in scale and date from the figural decoration of an early-seventh-century cinerary urn from Montescudaio near Volterra to the monumental sixth-century Capestrano Warrior statue.

Chapters 3 and 4 turn to the city and urbanism as an innovation that required and enabled a complex process of negotiation between what Bernard presents as the earlier historical culture that was dominated by ancestral aristocratic figures, and a newly emerging historical culture shaped by civic ideas. Chapter 3 explores themes of continuity and rupture in the context of the longue durée of Italy’s urban settlements. Tracing continuity, Bernard discusses instances in which the excavation of Archaic or Classical temples or other civic buildings revealed successive building histories, often reaching back to EIA huts; for an example of rupture, he provides instances in which EIA buildings, interpreted as aristocratic huts, were deliberately destroyed, as well as the evidence for foundation rites accompanying the actual foundation or ‘re-foundation’ of certain settlements. Chapter 4 discusses the theme of historical ‘founders’, defined here as “leading figures during the earliest moments of their respective urban communities” (p.121). These, Bernard believes, replaced the ‘aristocratic ancestors’ of kinship groups with individuals that held meaning for larger civic communities in urban societies across ancient Italy. Interpreted as representative of such are the prominent burials maintained over long periods of time in certain urban settings, as well as religious structures that have been related to the cult of Aeneas which, it is suggested, reflect how Greek commemorative practices “were mapped onto existing Italian practices” (p.166).

Chapter 5 is devoted to the subject of timekeeping in ancient Italy, explored here mainly through the reconstruction of calendars using written evidence (literary and epigraphic). A difference is presented between two models: ‘ancestral time’, again tied to the notion of early societies in Italy having been dominated by ruling aristocratic families as deduced from the funerary record; and ‘calendrical time’, thought to have been prevalent across Italy by the fifth century BC and functionally linked to the process of urbanisation (particularly the monumentalisation of religious architecture and increased use of writing associated with it). Throughout this chapter, Bernard highlights the close ties observable between time-keeping, calendars and religious practice in ancient Italy.

The sixth and final chapter turns to the subject of historical imagery, mainly in the form of commemorative paintings on temples and tombs from the latter end of the book’s chronological range. It represents a thorough survey of paintings (and a few sculpted reliefs) from across the Italian peninsula currently thought to depict historical characters or events, helpfully summarising the specific preceding debates and evaluating their historical meaning. Bernard presents historical imagery as a novel mode of historical production emerging in the fourth century BC, but one that has deep roots in Italian historical culture. He identifies a particular interest in the depiction of individuals which modern scholars identify as magistrates and other civic officials. In accordance with the overall theme of the book, this is again interpreted as indicating the crucial impact of urbanisation on social structure and, by extension, on historical culture.

With 320 pages (263 pages of text from beginning to conclusion), 55 black/white illustrations, four helpful maps and a handsome cover, this is an attractive and accessible volume. Bernard’s writing is clear and engaging and the bibliography is well curated and up-to-date; both admirable feats given the broad chronological and geographical scope. Scholars interested in any aspect of pre-Roman Italy will find something useful in the range of archaeological, epigraphic and literary sources discussed in this book. The arguments are convincing overall, although one is left wondering what alternative forms of historical culture may be revealed by a study that does not centre so heavily on elite groups and urban culture (and consequentially also the archaeological record of Etruria, Lazio and Campania). This is something future scholarship on the subject will surely take up, building on the new ground Historical culture has broken by demonstrating that the diverse societies of ancient Italy were deeply historical, and that the archaeological record has much to offer for those interested in investigating how the past and ‘present’ were approached, constructed and negotiated in ancient societies.