Editing Founding of Rome (section)

== Cultural context ==
{{see|Villanovan culture|Latial culture}}
[[File:Europe middle bronze age.png|thumb|right|Western Europe during its Middle Bronze Age, with the [[Apennine Culture]] in blue]]

The conventional division of pre-Roman cultures in Italy deals with cultures which spoke [[Indo-European language|Indo-European]] and non-Indo-European languages.{{sfn|Cornell|1995|pp=41–42}} The [[Italic languages]], which include [[Latin]], are Indo-European and were spoken, according to inscriptions, in the lower [[Tiber Valley]]. It was once thought that [[Faliscan language|Faliscan]] – spoken north of Veii on the right bank of the Tiber – was a separate language, but inscriptions discovered in the 1980s indicate that Latin was spoken more generally in the area. [[Etruscan language|Etruscan]] speakers were concentrated in modern [[Tuscany]] with a similar language called [[Rhaetic|Raetic]] spoken on the upper [[Adige]] (the foothills of the eastern [[Alps|Italian Alps]]).{{sfn|Cornell|1995|p=43}}

When drawing a connection between peoples and their languages, a reconstruction emerges with Indo-European peoples arriving in various waves of migrations during the first and second millennia BC: first a western Italic group (including Latin), followed by a central Italic group of [[Osco-Umbrian languages|Osco-Umbrian]] dialects, with a late arrival of [[Ancient Greek|Greek]] and [[Celtic languages|Celtic]] on the Italian peninsula, from across the [[Adriatic Sea|Adriatic]] and Alps, respectively. These migrations are generally believed to have displaced speakers of Etruscan and other pre-Indo-European languages; although it is possible that Etruscan arrived also by migration, almost certainly before 2000&nbsp;BC.{{sfn|Cornell|1995|p=44}}

The start of the Iron age saw a gradual increase in social complexity and population that led to the emergence of proto-urban settlements in central and northern Italy writ large. These proto-urban agglomerations were normally clusters of smaller settlements that were insufficiently distant to be separated communities; over time, they would unify.{{sfn|Lomas|2018|p=17}}