Le popolazioni indigene della Puglia preromana e gli Etruschi. Relazioni culturali e importazioni tra VIII e IV secolo a.C.

This paper aims to analyze the progress of archaeological research over the last thirty years, namely since the “XXXIII Convegno di Studi sulla Magna Grecia”, with topic on “Magna Grecia, Etruschi, Fenici”, held in Taranto in 1993. New research now allows us to better document the network of cultural contacts and trade that linked the centers of Tyrrhenian Etruria and Etruscanized Campania to the indigenous populations of pre-Roman Apulia (which includes the Melfese area) in the pre-Roman age, especially between the 8th and 4th centuries BC. This research clarifies certain aspects and, in some cases, suggests the physical presence of individuals or groups of individuals of Etruscan or Etruscan- Campanian origin in these territories on the opposite Adriatic shore. What reveals these relationships and presences is above all the discovery in different Apulian funerary contexts of objects referable to certain classes of materials attributable to certain or probable Etruscan manufacture (Etruscan, Etruscan-Campanian, Etruscan-Po Valley) or at least believed to be so (especially bucchero, bronze pottery, goldsmith’s work): these therefore come to assume the value of true archaeological indicators (“guide fossils”) of the relationships between the Etruscan world and that of southern Italy. These relationships are also revealed by some phenomena of considerable social importance like that of princely tombs during the Orientalizing and Archaic period and to all those ideals underlying them that have favoured the birth of the ruling classes with members of particular importance placed at the top of the communities, among which the presence of women invested with particular social and economic privileges stands out.