Terramare culture

Archaeological culture in Northern Italy
the technology complex of north Italy

Terramare, terramara, or terremare is a technology complex mainly of the central Po valley, in Emilia, Northern Italy, dating to the Middle and Late Bronze Age c. 1700–1150 BC. 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. 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 dwellings further north. His studies attracted the attention of Pellegrino Strobel and his 18 year 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 Gaetano Chierici's theory that the pile dwellings further north represented an ancestral Roman population, Pigorini developed a theory of Indo European settlement of Italy from the north.

The Terramare, in spite of local differences, 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. The whole is protected by an earthwork strengthened on the inside by buttresses, and encircled by a wide moat supplied with running water. In all over 60 villages are known, almost entirely from Emilia. In the Middle Bronze Age they are no larger than placed at an average density of 1 per In the Late Bronze Age many sites have been abandoned and the ones that were not are larger, up to 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 dead were given a burial: further investigation, however, of the cemeteries shows that both burial and cremation were practiced, with cremated remains placed in ossuaries; practically no objects were found in the urns. More recently, Italian archeologist Andrea Cardarelli has proposed re evaluations of contemporaneous Greek accounts, such as that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and to link the Terramare culture to the Pelasgians whom the Greeks generally equated with the Tyrrhenians and specifically, therefore, the Etruscans.