The religion of the people of Rome in the first centuries of the city's history has long been a topic of interest for scholars, but it has been investigated primarily through literary evidence recorded in the first century BC and later, many centuries after an urban community first began to develop in Rome in the eighth century BC. The contemporary archaeological data from the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries BC have been taken into account only sporadically, with the result that most scholarship supposedly focused on early Roman religion instead reproduces later Roman ideas about the...