ABSTRACT

At the dawn of the unification of Italy, between the 1880s and 1890s, a large project for the Archaeological Map of Italy brought to the attention of scholars a particular region north of Rome, known from literary sources as the Ager Faliscus (Barnabei et al. 1894, Gamurrini et al. 1972; Cozza – Pasqui 1981) (Fig. 14.1). The Faliscans were a population of Italic origin, as evidenced by the language commonly spoken and documented by numerous inscriptions, the oldest of which date from the seventh century bc. The inscriptions may be traced back to a common Latin origin (Deecke 1888, Giacomelli 1963, Bakkum 2009).