Terramare culture
Culture | Defunct
1700 BCE to 1150 BCE
Terramare, Terramara or Terremare is a technology complex mainly of the central Po valley, northern Italy, dating to the Middle and Late Bronze Age ca.
1700-1150 BCE.
It takes its name from the "black earth" residue of settlement mounds.
Terramare is from terra marna, "marl-earth", where marl is a lacustrine deposit.
It may be any color but in agricultural lands it is most typically black, giving rise to the "black earth" identification of it.
The population of the terramare sites is called the terramaricoli.
The sites were excavated exhaustively in 1860-1910.
These sites prior to the second half of the 19th century were commonly believed to have been used for Gallic and Roman sepulchral rites.
They were called terramare and marnier by the farmers of the region, who mined the soil for fertilizer.
Scientific study began with Bartolomeo Gastaldi in 1860.
He was investigating peat bogs and old lake sites in north Italy but did some investigations of the marnier, recognizing them finally as habitation, not funerary, sites similar to the pile dwelling further north.His studies attracted the attention of Pellegrino Strobel and his young (18 years old) assistant, Luigi Pigorini.
In 1862 they wrote a piece concerning the Castione di Marchesi in Parma, a Terramare site.
They were the first to perceive that the settlements were prehistoric.
Starting from the views of Gaetano Chierici that the pile dwellings further north represented a Roman ancestral population, Pigorini developed a theory of Indo-European settlement of Italy from the north.
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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.
The Terramare culture rises to prominence in northern Italy’s Po Valley.
In spite of local differences, the Terramare is of typical form; each settlement is trapezoidal, with streets arranged in a quadrangular pattern.
Some houses are built upon piles even though the village is entirely on dry land and some are not.
There is currently no commonly accepted explanation for the piles.
An earthwork, strengthened on the inside by buttresses, protects the whole; a wide moat supplied with running water encircles it.
In all, over sixty villages are known, almost entirely from Emilia.
In the Middle Bronze Age, they are no larger than two hectares (four point nine acres) placed at an average density of one per twenty-five square kilometers (nine point seven square miles).
Many sites have been abandoned in the Late Bronze Age, and the ones that have not are larger, up to sixty hectares (one hundred and fifty acres).
Of the remains discovered, stone objects are few; bronze axes, daggers, swords, razors and knives are found, as also minor implements, such as sickles, needles, pins, brooches, etc.
There are also objects of bone and wood, besides pottery (both coarse and fine), amber, and glass paste.
Small clay figures, chiefly of animals (though human figures are found at Castellazzo), are interesting as being practically the earliest specimens of plastic art found in Italy.
The Terramare people remain hunters, but also have domesticated animals; they are skillful metallurgists, casting bronze in molds of stone and clay; they are also agriculturists, cultivating beans, grapes, wheat, and flax.
Both inhumation and cremation are practiced, with cremated remains placed in ossuaries; practically no objects were found in the urns.
Cremation may have been a later introduction.