They had three important towns:
Canosa,
Silvium and
Bitonto; the present capital of
Apulia,
Bari, had not much importance. With increasing
Hellenization their
eponymous ancestor, given the name
Peucetis, was said by
Dionysius of Halicarnassus to have been the son of the
Arcadian Lycaon and brother of
Oenotrus. Lycaon having divided Arcadia among his twenty-two sons, Peucetios was inspired to seek better fortune abroad. This
etiological myth is considered by modern writers to suggest strongly that, as far as the Greeks were concerned, the Peucetii were culturally part, though an unimportant part, of
Magna Graecia.
Strabo places them to the north of the
Calabri. Strabo adds (VI.8) "...the terms Peucetii and Daunii are not at all used by the native inhabitants except in the early times." In the time of Strabo the territory occupied by the former Peuceti lay on the mule-track that was the only connection between
Brindisi and
Benevento. Pre-Roman ceramic evidence justifies Strabo's classification of Daunii, Peucetii and Messapii, who were all speakers of the
Messapian language. There were twelve tribal proto-statelets among the Peucetii, one of which is represented by modern
Altamura.
Genetics A genetic analysis of maternal haplogroups published in 2018 examined DNA extracted from 15 Iron Age (7th – 4th c. BCE) and 30 Roman period (1st – 4th c. CE) individuals buried at Iron Age Botromagno and Roman period Vagnari, now part of
Gravina in Puglia. The study supports previous hypotheses that the ancestors of the Iron Age Iapygians may have originated in the eastern Balkan region, or derive shared ancestry with a common source population from eastern Europe, and suggests that as the Romans occupied the region, they populated their Imperial properties with people from central Italy (possibly from the region of
Latium, and the surrounding environs of Rome). == See also ==