Failure or resilience? Community investments at ancient Roman Veii (central Italy)

While modern scholarship defines Etruscan Veii as a symbol of success, it interprets its later transformation into a small Roman town as a failure. Yet both written and archaeological records reveal that Veii’s Roman community invested in urban life, albeit on a smaller scale. This article argues that such developments are better understood through the lens of resilience than through binary categories of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. It invites broader reconsideration of how archaeologists apply these labels—often reflecting modern biases more than past realities—when studying historical settlements.