These people were the Faliscans. Their settlements must have required road connections, especially between their chief city, old Falerii, and Veii, with which it was allied. These roads the British archaeologists have identified in deep cuttings, identified as pre-Roman by inscriptions in Etruscan characters. (Faliscan was a dialect of Latin, but Etruscan inscriptions occur.) These earliest cuttings, sometimes nearly fifty feet deep, are driven impressively through cliffs, cut downward from the surface in a succession of working levels to match the slope of the finished road, with careful attention paid to drainage. Pre-Roman stone piers probably carried timber bridges, but most of the roads are mere ridgeway tracks, not unlike the medieval and modern farm tracks still to be found in the district. The Faliscans were apparently capable of ambitious engineering, but were driven by poverty to avoid it. The Romans used Faliscan cuttings when they found it convenient, it being their way to take things as they found them, introducing modifications only to the minimum extent necessary to suit their own needs. [Illustration: FIG. 12.3 Faliscan roads of the _ager Faliscus_. (_PBSR_, _loc. cit._, p. 105)] The most interesting and the most certainly identified Faliscan roads discovered in the British survey are in the neighborhood of Grotta Porciosa, a fortified site about four miles north-northeast of Cività Castellana and a mile and a half west of the Tiber. It controlled the ridge between two gorges, a natural route for a cross-country road between the Tiber and the towns of Gallese, Corchiano, and Cività Castellana. In these towns the Romans had no interest: the two main Roman roads in this area run not cross-country but north and south, the Via Flaminia close to the Tiber, the Via Amerina on the high ground five or six miles to the west. These roads bypassed all the towns just mentioned. But the cross-country tracks, on which the local inhabitants would travel, are visible both in air-photographs and on the ground, where they show no trace of Roman paving. At Grotta Porciosa itself, excavation would be required to reach the early Faliscan level; the majority of sherds found is local black glaze of a quite late pre-Roman period (mid-third century B.C.).