Whose is this? Material cultures and identities in central Apennine Italy.

The contribution aims to analyse the problematic relationship between material culture and ‘ethnic identity’, taking as a case study the pre-romans Italic peoples, with reference to those of central Apennine Italy. On a general methodological level, in fact, this relationship appears to be one of the most debated and problematised notions in archaeology, but also, at the same time, one of the most fundamental and common in the discipline itself. To overcome this contradiction, it has become increasingly common to circumvent a theoretical stance on the issue, thereby creating a large lacuna on a methodological level. The paper, on the contrary, wants to address this issue to fuel the debate, using as a case study a context, the preroman central Apennine Italy, in which a broad (material) cultural koiné corresponds, if we follow the Roman sources, to a rich mosaic of different peoples. The aim of the paper is therefore specifically to attempt, aware of the various stances in this long-running debate, to understand, motivate and qualify historically this cultural koiné, its partitions and the relationship it establishes with the peoples who express it.