Roman Colonization and Networks of Transformation in Northern Etruria during the First Century B.C.E

This dissertation is a study of the political and cultural unification of Italy during the period between the Social War and the Age of Augustus, focusing on four cities in the Arno River Valley of northern Etruria: Arretium, Faesulae, Florentia, and Pisae. This region provides an important case study for investigating socio-political change in late Republican and early Imperial Italy due to its prosperity and autonomy throughout the Republic while Rome was conquering most of peninsular Italy. After the Social War, Northern Etruria continued to fight against Roman hegemony well into the first century B.C.E. after which its territory was subject to repeated waves of colonization under Sulla, the Triumvirs, and Octavian, significantly altering patterns of land tenure and community demographics. These events appear on the surface to have caused a region-wide spike in economic production, urban building, and network ties during the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E. A great deal of attention in previous studies of the history and archaeology of the late Roman Republic has focused on explaining Italy's process of political and cultural unification under Rome which is thought to have been set in motion during the early first century B.C.E. and completed during the reign of the emperor Augustus (31 B.C.E. - 14 C.E.). A fundamental assumption of past scholarship has stressed the importance of Roman colonization in accelerating Italians' voluntary convergence toward a superior Roman state, a process sometimes referred to as "Romanization." My work reconsiders this scholarly agenda by contributing evidence from a region that has been previously marginalized in larger syntheses of socio-political change during the Roman Republic. This study aims to establish the degree to which the presence of veteran colonists at the cities along the Arno River altered the existing socio-political demographic into a homogeneous Roman society, and, in so doing, to contribute to the larger debate on the existence of an Italy unified under Rome during the course of the first century B.C.E.