The mountain communities of late-first millennium bc Italy have been regarded as non-urban societies that reverted to city life mainly owing to Roman intervention. A growing body of archaeological evidence is uncovering the diversity of settlement forms and dynamics in the region's pre-Roman past, which included sites encompassing a range of functions and social agents. This article presents an in-depth, microscale analysis of one such site, Monte Vairano in Samnium, drawing on perspectives from comparative urbanism. Monte Vairano developed urban characteristics such as a complex socioeconomic profile and political cohesion, as well as potentially more unique features such as an apparently balanced distribution of wealth. These results can shed further light on the diversity of ancient urbanization and its sociopolitical implications in late-first millennium bc Italy and the Mediterranean.

This article demonstrates how a contextual approach to material culture can help us think about the link between Roman hegemony and cultural change in Republican Italy. It does this by focusing on a particular set of artefacts — anatomical votive terracottas — that have been seen to indicate the spread of Roman and/or Latin culture in central Italy. Although the use of anatomical terracottas may have begun in the vicinity of Rome, communities in central Italy actively engaged with these artefacts according to their own cultural dispositions. Such signs of local agency are especially visible in the way that worshippers in the Apennine areas of central Italy favoured votive terracottas depicting legs, feet and hands, instead of reproductive organs, which were more popular in the Tyrrhenian zone. These findings emphasise the key role of local cultural practice in shaping the effect of accelerated political change on the micro-level.