The Terramare is a Middle and Recent…
2637 BCE to 910 BCE
Their total population probably reaches an impressive peak of more than one hundred and twenty thousand individuals near the beginning of the Late Bronze Age.
In the early period they live in villages with an average population of about one hundred and thirty people living in wooden stilt houses: they have a square shape, built on land but generally near a stream, with roads that cross each other at right angles.
Over the lifetime of the Terramare culture, these settlements develop into stratified zones with larger settlements of up to fifteen to twenty hectares (approximately fifteen hundred to two thousand people) surrounded by smaller villages.
Especially in the later period, the proportion of settlements that are fortified approaches one hundred percent.
The Terramare system collapses around the twelfth century BCE: the settlements are abandoned and the populations move southward, where they mingle with the Apennine peoples.
The influence of this population abandoning the Po valley and moving south may have formed the basis of the Tyrrhenian culture, ultimately leading to the historic Etruscans, based on a surprising level of correspondence between archeological evidence and early legends recorded by the Greeks.
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Southwest Europe
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