ABSTRACT
The preceding chapter 2 has dealt with the most important aspects of Bronze Age foundations on which the first millennium BC societies of southeast Italy arose. The basic aim of that chapter was to give a background to the following chapters 4-7: it offered a very generalized and necessarily incomplete picture of the societies of southeast Italy that preceded the societies of the first millennium BC. The present chapter gives a short account of the variety of landscapes in which these pre-Roman societies flourished. It introduces the names of the geographical elements as, for instance, rivers and mountain ridges that feature in the following chapters. Furthermore, the names are presented of both the districts and the groups of people that reportedly lived in these landscape units in the period under discussion. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to supply generic information on the geographical setting and introduce terms and names that are current in the archaeology of region under discussion. These will frequently pop up in the following chapters.
