Quelli vicini agli Enotri “alla maniera dei Peucezi” …ancora sui Peuketiantes di Ecateo da Mileto e la Basilicata settentrionale nell’età del Ferro

Abstract

The literary indirect tradition witnesses the presence of the so-called Peuketiantes close to the Oinotrian people
(St. Byz, s.v. Peuketiantes=Hecat., F. 89 Jacoby). According to different study approaches, either archaeological and
philological, they were located in different regions of Magna Graecia. This essay suggests they correspond to a branch
of the Japygian, which migrated to the Ionian coast during the Final Bronze Age and are defined Chones only in the
5th cent. b.C. (Antioch. in Strab. VI 1, 4, F. 12 Jacoby). The noun Peuketiates probably stems from the Osco-Sabellian
context and then the first Greek historians that describe the local ethne settled in Oinotrian changed the suffix -at to
-ant. Focusing on the Iron Age, the material culture betrays relationships among the Ionian and Tyrrhenian hinterlands,
probably through the Northern Basilicata, thanks to the rivers and the ancient road system of the Tratturi. At the end
of the 7th century b.C., for example, the settlement of Serra di Vaglio demonstrates to be one vertex of the triangular
Oinotria, extended from Sala Consilina to Incoronata di Pisticci.