The Romans of the Late Republic and the Principate looked back on the Greek Classical period, and on the "Age of Heroes" described by Homer. They could go to Greece as if to a museum and see, for instance, the great temples of the Athenian Democracy on the Acropolis, walk though the Parthenon and the Erechtheion [until Cornelius Sulla burned it all to the ground in 86 BCE, that is], and see the dedications made there from five centuries earlier. They could go to Delphi or Olympia and see the great offerings made there by famous figures of the past, like the famous giant golden and silver bowl of the Lydian king Croesus, or kouroi from the Archaic period, or bronze helmets taken from Spartan battles from the earliest days. They could go to Mycenae and see the "Tomb of Agamemnon" and imagine the great king of the Iliad resting there (he wasn't).

But that is is far back in time as their tour could go, and it was the same for the Classical Greeks they admired. Neither of them knew anything about the Bronze Age beyond the most vague notions (and those usually factually incorrect), and certainly nothing about any earlier epoch. The many Mycenaean burials that dotted the Greece countryside were not understood as such, and many were ascribed to the Homeric heroes instead. There was no understanding that another great Empire lived in Greece before them, that they spoke and wrote very early variant of Greek called Linear B, or inhabited the palace ruins which later were ascribed to the dwellings of Homeric heroes. These Romans could go do Knossos and admire the fanciful frescoes, but they had no notions of who the Minoans were, or how long before their own time the Minoans had lived.

It was the same for the Romans in their own country. They had no conception of the earliest days of the Indo-European settlement of Italia. They did not understand the debt "Roman" culture owes to the precursor Villanovan culture, or the great Urnfield culture which spread across much of Western Europe, northern Spain, and indeed northern Italy, in the centuries before the scattered huts beside the Tiber began to coalesce into something greater.

But: having said that, it is a bit unfair to censure ancient societies for their ignorance of their own pasts. Our modern understanding of the past is fueled greatly by excavation, by scientific principles (such as the study of the stratified layers of excavated soil), by modern methods of sorting data, dating material, and applying our findings to centuries and centuries of collected thought on how societies work, how they networked, how they lived, how they succeeded and failed. None of this was available to ancient investigators, and they generally did not have the ready access to information assembled by others interested in the same investigative goals. Even the most educated Roman scientists, when he dug in his garden and unearthed a bronze age cup, did not have a handy reference of "Italic Bronze Age Ceramic Types" to consult. If a Roman emperor had become interested in "archaeology" as a topic, and had ordered extensive excavations all over the Italian peninsula, I have no doubt that the investigators could have and would have come to use some of the same methods we use today: typological classification, stratigraphy, careful observation, etc. They certainly weren't idiots. There just wasn't that interest, for whatever reason.