10. The Archaic Countryside Revisited: A Ceramic Approach to the Study of Archaic Rural Infill in Latium Vetus

In the last decades, many field survey projects carried out in Latium have reconstructed a flourishing Archaic countryside that matches the strong urban development in this period (sixth century bce). Recently, the nature and density of this Archaic rural infill was called into question by Attema and others (2017) in a contribution to the proceedings of the conference ‘The Age of Tarquinius Superbus’. A crucial point emerged: that identification of phases of Archaic activity has often been based on pottery types and wares with long chronologies, pre- and postdating the Archaic period, and we poorly understand what a central Italian rural Archaic assemblage looks like. This chapter will add to this discussion by establishing the material fingerprint for a number of rural sites relating to this period - both published and unpublished (originating from the collection of the antiquarium di Nettuno) - and evaluate its implications by re-examining the evidence for Archaic occupation and state formation in several parts of southern Latium.