This is a list of ancient peoples living in Italy before the Roman conquest. Nearly all the names are either scholarly inventions or endonyms assigned by the writers of works in ancient Greek and Latin. The time window necessarily falls into the range of about 750 BC at the foundation of Rome to about 300 BC in the middle Roman Republic. Before the invention of writing, archaeological cultures might be hypothesized to have been associated with historical identities only in relatively isolated and continuous regions. Any further assumptions would be presumptuous by current standards. The ancient peoples of Italy are therefore confined to the Iron Age of Italy.