Build a new Property

< Previous Residence

The Mons Caelius Casa of Sitomagus Trinovantes

Next Residence >

The Roman Stone Age Tugurium!

In ancient Italy, written records did not come into general use until 500BC, and oral tradition did not hark back far beyond this date, as with all countries of the world, their earliest histories can only be explained by archaeological research. Italian prehistoric sites remain vague, and the data provided by archaeological methods are peculiarly difficult to harmonize with the knowledge supplied by the study of the early dialects of ancient Italy.

The Roman Stone Age seems a strange concept but the earliest traces of human habitation in ancient Italy consisted of cave-dwellings in the Apennine foot-hills and in Liguria. The rudely worked stone implements that were discovered in these rock-shelters indicate the presence of a palaeolithic folk, whose first representatives walked the Roman earth in 10,000BC. But the remains of these primitive people are too scanty to justify further inference as to date their first arrival or their place of origin as wandering hunter gatherers or hunter fishers. A later and quite distinct group of sites, extending from end to end of Italy, and no longer confined to the mountain recesses, indicates the presence of a more advanced population in a neolithic stage of development. These new people not only fashioned and polished its stone tools with super craftmenship, but had learnt to manufacture a rough form of pottery and to produce woven garments, these neolithic Romans had deserted their cave-dwellings, in order to cluster together in villages, where they constructed round-house like the Celts and began fledgling farmsteads. Unlike the Celtic round-houses there was an opening in the roof and a central basin to catch the rain, for these were the prototypes for the Roman Atrium and Impluvium. The human relics of the neolithic settlements show that their inhabitants were of short-limbed build, a long-headed type which has ever since predominated in the Mediterranean area. To this race the name Ligurian has been given, because it lingered in parts of ancient Italy until historical times, when Roman travelers observed it as a curious survival. Both in Liguria and elsewhere in Italy, were predominately of the Indo-European vocabulary, it has been inferred that the neolithic Ligurians belonged to the Aryan branch of the human family. But other evidence points to the Bronze Age as the period in which the Indo-Europeans first entered Italy. The Roman's told of their origins, being that of modest and rural country villagers and farmers, simple hardy folk with steely discipline and the strength to make an Empire, the Empire they believed, was their just reward from the gods for being such Worldly People. In Rome's earliest days, around 1,000BC, it was just one of many little villages, which were nothing more sophisticated than a collection of thatched cottages, as stated above, these thatched round-houses were dotted around Latium, a region in central Italy on the west coast. Yet despite its modest origins, Rome became the biggest city in the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean area, at its climax Rome had well over a million inhabitants, a population that would not be repeated in the world until London in the 19th century.

The Articles of The Roman Stone Age Tugurium!:

---

Write an article for The Roman Stone Age Tugurium!...