Comparative Trends of Italian societies between 1300 and 1100 BCE

Italy and the Central Mediterranean were intensely involved in the boom-and-crisis phase of the Mediterranean Late Bronze Age. It has been highlighted that Mediterranean connectivity did play a role in the development of new material productions, economic strategies and possibly social structures in the Central Mediterranean, even if the scale of the foreign influence is still disputed. At the end of the connective boom, the Mediterranean crisis around 1200 BCE saw differential responses in the different interconnected areas of Italy and the main surrounding islands: in some areas crisis was evident; in other neighbouring territories resilience or even prosperity was the case. What more, the innovations that came into use during the former connective boom were somewhere totally rejected, somewhere instead maintained or developed. Arguments discussing these outcomes have focused in the past mainly on the social structure of the Italian communities, arguing for a higher resilience by more hierarchical and structured societies. This can be partially maintained, but it seems that another factor should be considered in connection with social structure: the capacity of societies to assume change as a relevant factor of their adaptive strategy. It can be argued that societies more open to change did result in a better global resilience than self-referential social milieux. We will present some cases to describe comparatively the proposed arguments.