Food, economy, and identity in the Sangro River Valley, Abruzzo, Italy, 650 B.C.--A.D. 150

The Iron Age to the early Roman Empire (ca. 8th century B.C.--1st century A.D.) was a period of dynamic social change in the central Apennine Mountains of Italy, as it was on the entire peninsula. The Samnites, who inhabited this area, put up protracted resistance to Roman hegemony. Most of what has been known about Samnite lifeways, however, has come from Classical literature and excavations of funerary and ritual sites. Little direct evidence has been available regarding the character of Samnite subsistence, and by extension the economy that supported extensive Samnite military activity. This dissertation presents paleoethnobotanical evidence collected from excavations at the site of Acquachiara on Monte Pallano undertaken by the Sangro Valley Project. Excavations of an agricultural terrace dating from the 7th to the 5th century B.C. produced plant remains resulting from domestic activity and consumption. These remains are pertinent to reconstructing subsistence in the central Apennines during the period when the Samnite social group coalesced. Plant remains from a nearby farmhouse dating from the 1st to 2nd centuries A.D. were also analyzed, but proved of only limited use in examining diachronic changes in economy.;The plant assemblage from the 7th to the 5th century B.C. proved unusual in the apparent importance for human culinary use of Vicia ervilia (bitter vetch). It was also possible to demonstrate, via comparison with paleoethnobotanical remains from approximately contemporary sites throughout Italy, that consumption practices at Acquachiara simultaneously resemble different traditions in central and southern Italy. Specifically, Acquachiara shares a relatively high proportion of legumes with sites in Southern Italy, but in the choice of emmer wheat over barley, Acquachiara is more closely related to Rome. Additional evidence from classical commentary and 20th-century anthropological studies demonstrates that the inhabitants of Acquachiara shared in a long-term tradition of dependence on a diverse and flexible mountain subsistence base that often included nontraditional staple crops. The close theoretical relationship between food and social differentiation leads to the conclusion that it was in part differences in subsistence and environment that supported the construction and maintenance of a powerful Samnite group identity.