Every time I read about the early history of Rome I run into their conflicts with other peoples in Italy, and of course that comes to the Samnite wars.
Were the Samnites an urban people like the Greeks to the South of Rome and the Etruscans to the north? Or were we they more scattered and decentralized?
The book you want is E. T Salmon, Samnium and the Samnites. It's old (1967), but I don't think it's been surpassed at least in English as a regional study, as Harris' Rome in Etruria and Umbria has been by Bradley's book on Umbria.
There is a short section titled "Everyday Life": I'll give you some highlights.
Few urban centers; the Samnite language might not even have had a word for "city. Settlement was "rustic" and maybe no more than "collections of shepherds huts." What urban settlement there was was small, with the circuit of the walls being just a mile or less.
The economy was largely pastoral. Salmon says there "must have been servile and feudal aspects to a society which did not live under a city system of government but was organized in rural communities." Do what you want with that assumption, I suppose (I mean, as if the city system of government the Romans used lacked a servile element? I'm not quite sure exactly what values and assumptions went into making that statement - I think the "feudal" bit might be something related to client-patron relationships, which are currently being reevaluated).
The average Samnite may not have been a slave, but he lived a life of toil and hardship, no doubt as the retainer of a local dynast. His rough and ready life had few comforts and no high cultural tradition.
I think modern scholars would be a little annoyed by this statement and others like it. Salmon relies a lot on what Romans (often very later) had to say about Samnites; that's a more complicated project than I think Salmon realized. These later Romans are writing ideal or stereotypical Samnites into their past, and Salmon seems to be taking that more or less uncritically. Farney's book (Ethnic Identity in Republican Rome?) can help correct this use of stereotype.
Salmon supposes the governments were mixed constitutions (cf Polybius), using Oscan titles (touto, meddix instead of populus, praetor, etc.) organized into a general "Samnite League." "This is not surprising... federal unions were more likely to emerge among people who were politically backward and who had not established flourishing, self-governing, municipal commonwealths." Again, assumptions and values...