Terramare culture

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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