This project offers a new explanation for the emergence of ethnic groups in pre-Roman Italy. The Roman conquest of Italy in the fifth to third centuries BCE was made easier by the disunity of the peninsula’s inhabitants, divided into myriad autonomous groups who failed to mount an effective unified resistance. My project traces the origins of these groups (Etruscans, Latins, Messapians, and others), pushing their beginnings much earlier than previously thought and proposing a new explanation for their character. Applying social network analysis to the distributions of exotic artifacts, I reconstruct the interactions of Bronze Age peoples in Italy in the late second millennium BCE and demonstrate that these early regional “networks” solidified into the cultural groups visible five hundred years or more later. The character of these early networks is a predictor of which groups later developed an “ethnic” consciousness and which did not.