The ultimate goal of my new project Changing group identities in the multicultural pre- and postcolonial central Italy that I will work upon in 2016–2018 at Stockholm with the funding from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) is to develop a general model for characterising multicultural group identities. This model could be applied at least in part to any geographic area or archaeological period. My own research questions relate to a specific historical and cultural situation that led to the expansion of Rome and the creation of the Roman Empire and I will specifically explore the importance of multiculturality as a precondition to certain historical developments.

The geographical and cultural context of my study is central Italy between the Orientalising and Republican periods. These periods incorporated the precolonial and colonial situations in relation to Latin colonisation that defines the geographic extent of the study area. My key case study is the Faliscan area in south Etruria, and its relationship to other cultural areas in the region, such as the Latin, Etruscan and Sabine areas. Both my postdoctoral project, The boundaries and territorial geographies of Archaic and early Roman central Italy, and this new project as its extension are built upon my fieldwork within the Nepi Survey Project and the Remembering the Dead excavation project at Crustumerium (Rome).

My field projects made me interested in intercommunity interaction and its different outcomes in the region (cf. Rajala 2012; in press) and resulted in me starting working towards the theoretical framework of my current research. My model characterising group identities will be based upon Social Identity Theory (SIT) that has been only rarely applied in. Different archaeological proxies will be used to describe the attachment of individuals to different individual and group identities, most prominently inscriptions and tomb architecture. My discourse will be interdisciplinary between Etruscology, Roman archaeology and Roman history and combine theoretical elements from different social and humanistic disciplines. In addition, my project is linked to the separate research project of Dr Karin Westin Tikkanen at the University of Gothenburg in classics, studying the earliest alphabet signs in Italy, also funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet).

I continue to publish articles on the Nepi Survey Project I ran as a PhD student and on of The Romanisation of a Faliscan town project, I acted as the Principle Investigator (PI) for, financed by a British Academy Small Grant. The final publication of the Remembering the Dead excavation project at Cisterna Grande (Crustumerium, Rome, Italy) is under preparation.

I am now the coordinator of the Stockholm Volterra Project that will carry out prospection and research in this Etruscan town again during the Academic Year 2016/2017 for which I have funding from different sources.

Links

Landscape Perceptions blog at http://landscapeperceptions.blogspot.com

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

• Italic inscriptions and databases workshop (Rome 23 September 2014)

  2016. Ulla Rajala.

  Bok (red)

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• Justin St. P. Walsh: Consumerism in the Ancient World: Imports and Identity Construction. Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies. Routledge, New York – London 2014. ISBN 978-0-415- 89379-4 (hb). XVIII, 218 pp. USD 140, GBP 85

  2016. Ulla Rajala. Arctos 2015 (43), 320-322

  Artikel

  Läs mer om Justin St. P. Walsh: Consumerism in the Ancient World: Imports and Identity Construction. Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies. Routledge, New York – London 2014. ISBN 978-0-415- 89379-4 (hb). XVIII, 218 pp. USD 140, GBP 85

• Nested identities and mental distances

  2016. Ulla Rajala. Burial and social change in first-millennium BC Italy: approaching social agents, 161-193

  Kapitel

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• Pre-colonial Latin Colonies and the Transition to the Mid-republican Period in the Faliscan Area and South Etruria

  2016. Ulla Rajala. Papers of The British School at Rome 84, 1-72

  Artikel

  This paper discusses the survey evidence from the Orientalizing and Archaic settlement and funerary sites at Nepi (ancient Nepet), one of the first Latin colonies outside Latium adiectum. The comparison of its pre-Roman, pre-colonial developments to the Roman patterns from the Nepi Survey Project and the trends from other Latin colonies in southern Etruria allows the examination of the local effects of Roman colonialism. The evidence shows that Nepi seemed to develop as an independent city state in the Orientalizing period, peaked in the Archaic period and weakened before the capture of Veii in 396 bc, making it easier to defeat. Rural settlement all but disappeared afterwards with similar hiatus apparent at the sister colony at Sutri as well. In the third century bc the first few villas near the town appeared as a sign of the establishment of a Roman settlement pattern. The extensive ‘rural colonization’ at Nepi, similarly to Sutri and Cosa, started only in the second century bc when all southern Etruria had entered a colonial phase and could develop alongside Rome. Thus, Latin colonization disrupted earlier patterns and the colonies appear to have been originally outposts set up to secure new territory.

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• Separating the emotions

  2016. Ulla Rajala. Archaeologists and the Dead, 68-96

  Kapitel

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