1Prehistoric Italy

In May of 1945 two young British Army officers, John Bradford and Peter Williams-Hunt, based with the R.A.F. at Foggia in the province of Puglia, near the heel of Italy, found that the World War II armistice left them with time on their hands. Both trained archaeologists, they readily prevailed upon the R.A.F. to combine routine training flights with pushing back the frontiers of science. The result of their air reconnaissance was to change profoundly the archaeological map of Italy.

The value of air-photography for archaeology had long been known; as early as 1909 pictures taken from a balloon had revealed the plan of Ostia, the port of ancient Rome. But the English, especially such pioneers as Major G. W. G. Allen and O. G. S. Crawford, early took the lead in interpreting, on photographs taken usually for military purposes, vegetation-marks showing the presence and plan of ancient sites buried beneath the soil, and invisible to the groundling’s eye. Where the subsoil has been disturbed in antiquity by the digging of a ditch, the increased depth of soil will produce more luxuriant crops or weeds; where soil-depth is decreased by the presence of ancient foundations, walls, floors, or roads, the crop will be thin, stunted, lighter incolor. Air-photographs taken in raking light, just after sunrise or just before sunset in a dry season, especially over grassland, will highlight these buried landscapes. The Tavoliere, the great prairie where Foggia lies, thirty by fifty-five miles in extent, suits these conditions admirably; its mean annual rainfall is only 18.6 inches (0.6 in July) or half that of Rome, and Rome is a dry place, at least in summer. So Bradford and Williams-Hunt had high hopes for their project.

In a Fairchild high-wing monoplane, in which the position of struts and nacelles does not interfere with the operation of a hand-held camera, they took oblique shots at 1,000 feet with an air camera of 8-inch focal length. For vertical shots they used, at 10,000 feet, air cameras of 20-inch focal length, mounted tandem to produce overlap for stereoscopic examination, which makes pictures three-dimensional. The thousands of resulting photographs were at a scale of about 1:6000, or ten inches to the mile, over four times as large as the best available ground maps (the 1:25,000 series of the Italian Istituto Geografico Militare.)

Bradford, realizing the archaeological value of the millions of air-photographs taken during the war by the British and American Strategic Air Commands, prevailed upon the authorities to deposit prints, giving complete coverage for Italy, in Rome (with the British and Swedish Schools) and the American Academy. The initiative of Prof. Kirk H. Stone procured a similar set for the University of Wisconsin. The stereoscopic study of these collections will mean great strides in Italian archaeology. The accuracy of the data obtained is amazing: ditches estimated from the photographs with a good micrometer scale to be four feet wide proved when measured on the ground to be precisely that.

What the photographs revealed, scattered over the 1650 square miles of the Tavoliere, were over 2000 settlements, some up to 800 yards across, surrounded by one to eightditches. Within the ditched area, and approached by in-turned, tunnel-shaped entrances, were smaller, circular patches, which looked like hut-enclosures, or “compounds.” Three examples of the sites photographed will illustrate typical settlements. At a site identified on the map (Fig. 1.1) as San Fuoco d’Angelone, eight miles northeast of Foggia, the photographs showed a ditch-enclosed oval measuring 500 × 400 feet, and an inner circle 260 feet across, with what proved to be the characteristic funnel-shaped opening. At Masseria Fongo, four miles south of Foggia, the oval was estimated at 480 yards long, with a 12-foot entrance and 12-foot ditches. At Passo di Corvo (Fig. 1.2), eight miles northeast of Foggia, the enclosure measured 800 × 500 yards, and the details were revealed by masses of flowers, yellow wild cabbage, mauve wild mint, white cow-parsley.

So much for results from the study of photographs. The next step for Bradford was to spend a fruitful season in the study. Archaeology is a comparative science: to know one site is to know nothing; to know a thousand is to see some factors unifying all. Thus the settlement-shapes of the Tavoliere are reminiscent of the fortified stronghold of Dimini in Thessaly (Fig. 1.3), dated by its excavation in the late neolithic age, which in Greece means about 2650B.C.They also look like the fortified site of Altheim near Munich (Fig. 1.4), also late neolithic, which in Germany means about 1900B.C.Culture in Europe moved from east to west; in general the farther west the site, the later it reached its successive levels of culture. The Tavoliere sites, lying geographically between Dimini and Altheim, might well be intermediate in date also; by their shape, at any rate, they are almost certainly to be dated sometime in the neolithic period. So much can be guessed before the indispensable next step is taken. The next step is excavation.

Prehistoric Sites in ItalyArene Candide12Balzi Rossi14Bologna11Cagliari27Caltagirone31Campo di Servirola7Canale30Capestrano17Castellazzo di Fontanellato5Como1Cozzo Pantano34Dessueri37Este4Foggia22Golasecca2Lipari Is.29Masseria Fongo23Matera25Milocca35Molfetta24Ostia19Padua3Pantalica33Parma6Passo di Corvo20Plemmirio36Reggio Emilia8Rimini13Rome18San Fuoco d’Angelone21San Giovenale16Spina9Su Nuraxi26Thapsos32Torre Galli28Vibrata Valley15Villanova101. Como2. Golasecca3. Padua4. Este5. Castellazzo di Fontanellato6. Parma7. Campo di Servirola8. Reggio Emilia9. Spina10. Villanova11. Bologna12. Arene Candide13. Rimini14. Balzi Rossi15. Vibrata Valley16. San Giovenale17. Capestrano18. Rome19. Ostia20. Passo di Corvo21. San Fuoco d’Angelone22. Foggia23. Masseria Fongo24. Molfetta25. Matera26. Su Nuraxi27. Cagliari28. Torre Galli29. Lipari Is.30. Canale31. Caltagirone32. Thapsos33. Pantalica34. Cozzo Pantano35. Milocca36. Plemmirio37. DessueriFig. 1.1Prehistoric sites in Italy.

Prehistoric Sites in Italy

1. Como2. Golasecca3. Padua4. Este5. Castellazzo di Fontanellato6. Parma7. Campo di Servirola8. Reggio Emilia9. Spina10. Villanova11. Bologna12. Arene Candide13. Rimini14. Balzi Rossi15. Vibrata Valley16. San Giovenale17. Capestrano18. Rome19. Ostia20. Passo di Corvo21. San Fuoco d’Angelone22. Foggia23. Masseria Fongo24. Molfetta25. Matera26. Su Nuraxi27. Cagliari28. Torre Galli29. Lipari Is.30. Canale31. Caltagirone32. Thapsos33. Pantalica34. Cozzo Pantano35. Milocca36. Plemmirio37. Dessueri

Fig. 1.1Prehistoric sites in Italy.

Fig. 1.2Passo di Corso, low-oblique air photo (May 1945, by John Bradford) across the Neolithic settlement, 7 miles N.E. of Foggia. Crop-marks revealed the parallel lines of surrounding ditches (in foreground and background), with many enclosures inside.

Fig. 1.3Dimini, a late Neolithic site in Thessaly.(H. Bengtson,Grosser historischer Weltatlas, 44a)

Fig. 1.3Dimini, a late Neolithic site in Thessaly.

(H. Bengtson,Grosser historischer Weltatlas, 44a)

Fig. 1.4Altheim, a late Neolithic site near Munich.(H. Bengtson,Grosser historischer Weltatlas, 44f)

Fig. 1.4Altheim, a late Neolithic site near Munich.

(H. Bengtson,Grosser historischer Weltatlas, 44f)

Modern archaeological excavation is neither haphazard nor a treasure hunt. It is a scientific business, preceded by careful survey, conducted with minute attention to levels and strata (the level in which an object is found determines its relative date; comparison with similar objects found elsewhere that can be dated determines its absolute date), and followed by scrupulous recording and publication of the evidence. A dig is not a treasure hunt. Naturally an archaeologist is pleased if he turns up gold or precious stones, but he knows in advance that an old stone age site will produce neither, but rather something infinitely more valuable, an intimate knowledge of man’s past, gained from ordinary humble objects of daily household use. To find these was Bradford’s object when he began to dig. (Williams-Hunt had meanwhile been posted to the Far East.) And he found them. Passo di Corvo, for example, yielded typical neolithic artifacts: stone axes, querns (hand-mills for grinding grain), bone points, stone sickles, pendants, spindle-whorls, and, best of all, vast quantities of potsherds, over 4,000 found in fourteen days. The potsherd is the archaeologist’s best friend. Pots are virtually indestructible, they turn up everywhere, and comparison with pots of similar shape and decoration, found elsewhere, yields precious information about dates, imports, exports, trade-routes, and the aesthetic taste of the pot’s maker and user.

S. Fuoco d’Angelone, for example, yielded typical neolithic pottery: rich brown or glossy black burnished ware, undecorated but thin-walled, symmetrical, and well-made (by hand, not on a potter’s wheel; sooner or later the use of the wheel produces shoddy commercialism). Together with it were found sherds of a fine-textured buff ware, painted with wide bands (fasce larghe) of tomato red. There were also very thin burnished bowls in cream and gray.

After excavation, the archaeologist must return to the study and to the comparative method; an exacting and exciting pursuit of parallels, especially for the pottery, in the hope of dating it and tracking down its origins. The factsare recorded in technical excavation reports, often buried in obscure or local journals. Oftener, the results of excavation are unpublished (it is always more fun to dig than to write.) In that case, the facts are treasured up in the notes or the memories of the excavator, often a local archaeologist. He belongs to a splendid breed, burning with enthusiasm, brimful of knowledge, and eager to share what he knows, in conversation if not in print.

So Bradford read and talked, and found his parallels. The wares he had excavated were familiar; they had been found elsewhere in the heel of Italy, especially opposite or in Matera, in Lucania, and Molfetta, in Puglia, between Barletta and Bari, in contexts dated 2600–2500B.C.And this pottery proves to have affinities, too, with that of Thessalian Sesklo, a neolithic site not far from Dimini. This same type of pottery can be traced across the Balkans into Illyricum, and thence across the Adriatic to Bradford’s sites, giving in the process a glimpse of neolithic man as a more daring seafarer than had previously been thought.

And so, by patient, detailed work like Bradford’s, the newly-discovered sites are fitted into and enrich the pattern of the neolithic world. The total mapping fills a huge gap in the picture of the findspots of Neolithic sites in Italy. Before 1945, some 170 were known; now the Tavoliere alone makes up more than that number. And Passo di Corvo becomes the largest known neolithic site in Europe.

The things the archaeologists did not find are instructive, too. No weapons were found: the inference is that the Tavoliere folk were unwarlike. There is no evidence that the sites survived into the Bronze Age: it looks as though, like unwarlike peoples all too often elsewhere, they were wiped out in an invasion.

It is clear from the artifacts and the site-plans that neolithic man on the Tavoliere lived like neolithic man elsewhere in Italy, that the culture was on the whole uniform. He lived in a wattle-and-daub hut with a sunken floor, acentral hearth, and a smokehole—the remote and primitive predecessor of the atrium-and-impluvium house of historic Roman times, whose central apartment had a hole in the roof with a pool below to catch rain water. Fortunately for us, his wife was a slovenly housekeeper: from her rubbish we can reconstruct her way of life. In his enclosures he penned the animals he had domesticated: other Italian sites have yielded the bones of the sheep, goat, horse, ox, ass, and pig. The dog has not yet become man’s best friend in the neolithic Tavoliere. Primitive man in Italy had a rudimentary religion: the Ligurian cave of Arene Candide has yielded statuettes of big-breasted, pregnant women, which probably had something to do with a fertility cult. In another Ligurian cave, Balzi Rossi, over 200,000 stone implements have been found. Not far up the Adriatic coast from Foggia, in the Vibrata valley, lie the foundations of 336 neolithic huts. We know something, too, of neolithic man’s burial customs, and macabre enough they seem: skulls have been found smeared with red ochre; apparently the flesh was stripped from the corpse—a practice called in Italianscarnitura—and the stain applied to the bared bone. All this suggests a level of culture far below that which the Near East was enjoying at the same time: Passo di Corvo’s mud huts are contemporary with the Great Pyramid of Egypt, with palaces and temples in Mesopotamia (seeFig. 1.5). But there is no evidence that neolithic man in Italy was priest-ridden or tyrannized over, as the Egyptians and Akkadians were; he is rather to be thought of as the ancestor of the sturdy peasant stock which was to form the backbone of Roman Italy.

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Fig. 1.5Comparative table of early cultures.(C. F. C. Hawkes,The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe,Table IV)

Fig. 1.5Comparative table of early cultures.

(C. F. C. Hawkes,The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe,Table IV)

Fig. 1.6Terramaraat Castellazzo di Fontanellato, Pigorini’s plan.(G. Säflund,Le terremare, Pl. 93)

Fig. 1.6Terramaraat Castellazzo di Fontanellato, Pigorini’s plan.

(G. Säflund,Le terremare, Pl. 93)

Bradford’s methods are scientific, but archaeology has not always been the exact science it is today. Americans may be proud that the first recorded scientific excavation took place in Indian mounds in Virginia. The date was 1784, and the excavator was Thomas Jefferson. But thereafter archaeologicalprogress was sporadic, and relapse accompanied advance. In the mid-nineteenth century most excavations in Italy were more like rape than science, their aim being to dredge up treasures for the nobility and the art-dealers.

Thus when in 1889 the distinguished Italian anthropologist Luigi Pigorini excavated the site of Castellazzo di Fontanellato, twelve miles northwest of Parma, in the Po Valley, there was no absolute guarantee that the dig would be scientific. Yet Pigorini’s announced results have colored the whole picture of the Bronze Age in Italy, and it is only recently that they have been doubted. The story of his announced results, the growing scepticism, the re-examination of the ground, and the present state of the question is an illuminating if sobering one.

What Pigorini was after was the evidence for the prehistoric settlements which have come to be calledterremare. They owe their discovery, their name, and their destruction to the fertilizing quality of the earth of which they are composed.Terra marnais the name in the dialect of Emilia for the compost heaps formed by the decay of organic matter in certain mounds of ancient date, mostly south of the Po. Farmers repeatedly found potsherds and other artifacts, often of bronze, in these mounds, and Pigorini determined to examine them before all the evidence should be dispersed. Castellazzo di Fontanellato is the most famous of his efforts.

He found clear, though meager, evidence in pottery and metal artifacts (axes, daggers, pins, razors) of a Bronze Age culture, but no report of the levels in which he found these objects survives, and indeed in this as in mostterremarethe farmer’s shovel has completely upset the levels. Roman terracotta, medieval pottery, and prehistoric bronze axe-heads jostle one another in confusion. Besides, the prehistoric site has been continuously inhabited, and, in consequence, the soil continuously turned over, ever since Roman times.

Pigorini apparently dug isolated, random trenches rather than the continuous ones which would have enabled him to trace a ground-plan securely. It is hard to see, without more evidence than he supplies, how the grandiose grid of his ultimate plan (Fig. 1.6) could be deduced from the disconnected series of trenches figured on his earliest one. Though he had to contend with the most vexatious swampy conditions, working in the midst of constant seepage and ubiquitous mud, in which a rectangular grid could hardly have survived, he was nevertheless able to persuade himself, at Castellazzo, of the existence of a ditch and a rampart, reinforced by wooden piling. (Post-holes and piles he certainly found, and photographed.)

By 1892 he had convinced himself that his site had a trapezoidal plan, surrounded by a ramparted ditch thirty yards wide and ten feet deep. (Some of his dimensions suggest a prehistoric unit of measure in multiples of five; others a foreshadowing of the Roman foot of twenty-nine centimeters.) Running water derived from a tributary of the Po supplied the hypothetical ditch, which was crossed on the south by a wooden drawbridge thirty yards wide and sixty yards long. South of the site Pigorini claimed to have found a cemetery (M) perfectly square in plan, for cremation urn-burials, and westward another, rectangular one.

In 1893 he announced the discovery, within the rampart, halfway along its east side, of a mound in a reserved area ortemplum(G), surrounded by its own ditch; in 1894 thistemplumbecame thearx, or citadel of the settlement, having in its midst a sacrificial trench (mundus) containing in its floor, for the deposit of the sacrificial fruits, five sinkholes each equipped with a wooden cover.

Fig. 1.7Su Nuraxi, a Sardiniannuraghe. (Illustrated London News)

BURIAL RITESin theEARLY IRON AGEFig. 1.8Cremating and inhumating peoples of prehistoric Italy. (D. Randall-MacIver,Italy before the Romans, p. 45)

BURIAL RITESin theEARLY IRON AGE

Fig. 1.8Cremating and inhumating peoples of prehistoric Italy. (D. Randall-MacIver,Italy before the Romans, p. 45)

In 1895 and 1896 he published claims to have found within the rampart a grid of streets (cardinesanddecumani), which he held to be the ancestor of the grid in Roman camps and Roman colonies. The total plan was alleged to resemble that of primitive Rome (Roma Quadrata),and the wooden bridge was compared to Rome’s early wooden one across the Tiber, the Pons Sublicius. At another site one of Pigorini’s pupils claimed to have found traces of a ritual furrow like that with which hundreds of years later the Romans were to mark the line of the future walls of a colony. For Pigorini and his school regarded theterremarefolk as the ancestors of an Iron Age people called Villanovans, and ultimately of the Romans of historical times.

Since Pigorini’s death in 1920 other archaeologists have been moved to go over the ground again, revising his findings and his inferences. Having excogitated his grid plan for Castellazzo di Fontanellato, Pigorini seems to have generalized from it rather more widely than the evidence warranted. While rectangular or square plans are not denied for someterremare(modern investigators enumerate ten), many sites are oval, not unlike Bradford’s Tavoliere hut-settlements. In fact theterremareplan varies more than Pigorini was willing to admit. Furthermore, parallel in date to theterremareare unmoated hut villages and true lake dwellings. (Theterremareare lake dwellings without the lake, presumably a reminiscence in the minds of immigrants from beyond the Alps of their primordial homes.)

But while we must grant to his critics that Pigorini had, to say the least, a strong imagination, we need not go so far as one of his detractors who argued that theterremareare Bronze Age pigsties. One site has an area of thirty-five acres, which is a bit large for a pigsty.

Theterremareare important: they preserve the memory of an immigrant population, distinct in culture from the aborigines. The distinguishing marks of this new culture are knowledge of metal-working, a pottery identifiable by its exaggerated half-moon handles, and the practice of cremation rather than inhumation. On the evidence, we must suppose that this new culture emerged about 1500B.C.as a fusion of indigenous hut-dwellers and immigrant lakedwellers.Bronze bits found in their settlements show that they had domesticated the horse, and there is some evidence, outside theterremare, for dogs as well, described by Randall-MacIver as “doubtless good woolly animals of a fair size.”

In fact the Bronze Age in Italy of which theterremareare a part represents a considerable cultural development beyond the level of the Neolithic Tavoliere folk. Cave dwellings from Liguria show a people using wagons and ox-drawn plows. Chemical analysis of their copper shows that some of it comes from central Germany, though a copper ingot from Sardinia betrays by its impressed double-ax trade-mark some connection with Minoan Crete. (Theterremareare contemporary with Mycenae.) Bronze Age women wore jewelry: jadeite arm rings, necklaces of pierced red coral, bored stones, or clamshells. Curious stamps calledpintaderaswere used to impress a pattern in color on the body. A horned mannikin, with penis erect, from Campo di Servirola, now in the museum of Reggio Emilia, may be evidence for fertility cult, like the neolithic female idols from the Ligurian caves.

The Po valley in the Bronze Age was a melting pot in which a variety of cultures, indigenous and immigrant, mingled. What is to be read from the excavations is almost a recapitulation in this early period, in terms of creative imitation of imported and native forms and ideas, of the whole cultural history of Rome. To our knowledge of this culture, and to our appreciation of the importance of scrupulous archaeological recording, the curious story of Pigorini’sterremarecontributed not a little.

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The island of Sardinia to the archaeologist is a fascinating curiosity, isolated, until recently, by its unhealthy climate and its odd dialect. In prehistoric times, however, while Sardinia’s development does not parallel that of the mainland, its level of culture appears from archaeological findsand monuments to have been higher, not lower, than that of Italy proper. This superior level seems to have been due to Sardinia’s richness in metals. To protect the wealth, the prehistoric islanders built enormous watchtowers, callednuraghi, which developed into veritable feudal castles with villages nestling at their feet.

Recent excavations (1951–56) by Professor Giovanni Lilliu of the University of Cagliari have cast clearer light on Sardinia’s culture. He excavated the hugenuragheof Su Nuraxi, at Barumini, some thirty miles north of Cagliari. When he began, Su Nuraxi was a small hill covered with ruins, earth, and scrub. Now six campaigns have revealed a truncated conical tower (Fig. 1.7), built, without mortar, of huge many-sided blocks of basalt. Clustered above the tower he found a small Village; the whole complex—tower plus the village—is surrounded by othernuraghion neighboring hills. To the original single tower four others, with upper courses of dressed stone, were added in a clover-leaf pattern, linked by a curtain-wall enclosing a court sixty feet deep, with a reservoir fifteen feet deep for drinking water. The central tower is three stories high, with a corbelled or false-vaulted roof built of gradually converging horizontal courses. The upper stories were reached by a spiral stair in the thickness of the wall. Lilliu meticulously observed stratigraphy; for dating, he submitted samples of carbonized matter from the towers to laboratories in Milan, and was told that the Carbon 14 process dates his remains as 1270B.C.± 200 years.

The C14method of dating, an American device discovered and perfected by Professor W. F. Libby and his associates at the University of Chicago Institute of Nuclear Studies, is sufficiently new to deserve a word of explanation here. All living matter has a uniform radioactivity associated with its carbon content. The supply of the radioactive isotope C14ceases when living matter, wood, foliage, etc., dies. Scientists can calculate the time elapsed since death bycounting the residual radioactivity of C14in the organic specimen, since the rate of decay can be described by specifying how long it takes for half the number of atoms in a given sample to disintegrate. For C14this period, called its “half-life,” is 5700 years. If the present assay of a specimen of organic matter, for instance, is 12.5 C14explosions per minute per gram of carbon, an ancient organic sample assaying at 6.25 would be 5700 years old (the half-life of C14). Checking with samples of known date has proved the method accurate within 200 years either way. For most classical objects found in association with organic matter this is valueless, since a trained archaeologist can date a pot, an inscription, or an architectural block by eye within fifty years or less. But the method is invaluable for making more precise the great sweeps of time in prehistory. Thus the lowest C14date for Su Nuraxi, 1070B.C., would take it almost into the Iron Age in Italy; at this date culture on the mainland was much more primitive.

Lilliu calls the period of the four added towers Lower Nuragic I, and dates it 800–750B.C.These smaller towers contain each a single cell with two rows of loopholes. They are guard-posts, and are equipped with speaking-tubes for the guards use when challenging.

In the next period, Upper Nuragic I, dated by Lilliu 750–500B.C., the earth having subsided, the four towers and the walls were reinforced. The ground-level entrance was blocked, and replaced by a new entrance twenty-one feet higher, accessible only by ladder. Battlements now replaced the loopholes. Stone balls found in the excavations were apparently the projectiles hurled from these battlements. From a watchtower added to the centralnuraghecome conch shells, perhaps intended to be sounded like trumpets.

The surrounding village, of 200 or 300 huts, separated by narrow labyrinthine passages, housed the troops; the chief lived in the tower. The village, hard-hit when the Carthaginians sacked it late in the sixth centuryB.C., survivedin decadence till the late first centuryB.C.The typical oval or rectangular plan of an early Su Nuraxi village hut resembles that of the Bronze Age in Sicily or Cyprus. One contained a pit for votive offerings. Sixty round huts, with lower courses in stone, have been dated in Upper Nuragic I. They would have been roofed, like shepherd huts in Sardinia to this day, with logs and branches weighted by stones. One larger circle has seats around its inner perimeter. It was equipped with shelves, a niche, a stone basin, and a sacred stone (a model of anuraghe). Lilliu thinks this must have been the warriors’ council chamber.

Su Nuraxi yielded artifacts in stone, terracotta, bronze, iron, lead, and amber, the latter showing connections with trade routes to the Baltic. Lilliu found axes, millstones, pestles, and bronze votive statuettes. Pottery andfibulae(humble safety-pins, whose shapes, varying from age to age, are a help in dating) suggest connections with Phoenicia—via Carthage—and Etruria, whose rich and, in certain respects, mysterious culture is discussed in the next chapter.

In a later phase, after the Carthaginian invasion, the huts have fan-shaped rooms, each devoted to a specialized occupation, baking, oil-pressing, stone-tool making. A pair of stone boot-trees, or shoe-lasts, presumably from a cobbler’s shop, was one of the more curious finds. Gewgaws in glass paste, poor, decadent, commercialized, but traditional in design, testify to the material and aesthetic poverty of this period. Only the last phase yielded tombs, but a huge stele with a curved top may have marked the entrance to what the peasants call a Giant’s Grave, a Stone Age slab-edged tomb, forming a corridor sometimes as much as twenty yards along, from which two wings branch off to form a semicircular approach.

This scientific dig provides a fixed foundation for future research into earlier ages on Sardinia. Lilliu is understandably excited about the “dynamic spirit” revealed by thecreators of this amazingly early massiveness, but like all massiveness, whether of pyramid, ziggurat, or Roman Imperial palace, it undoubtedly justifies the unhappy inference that with all this grandeur went autocracy.

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Perhaps the mainland political system in the early Iron Age was less rigid; at any rate it can boast no architectural remains as sophisticated as the Sardiniannuraghi. But the artifacts, especially from graves, are more numerous than for the Bronze or Neolithic Ages, and the graves show that roughly speaking the peninsula was divided in the early Iron Age between two cultures (Fig. 1.8): the folk west of a line drawn from Rome to Bimini cremated their dead; those east of that line inhumed them. In and near Rome the two burial rites are mingled: the significant inference from this fact will be explained later. Because the finds are so much more numerous on the mainland, the resulting inferences involve a much more complex subdivision into cultures and periods. We may single out three sets of inferences, based primarily on three major archaeological efforts. The first is Pericle Ducati’s work at Bologna, which distinguished four cultural phases, named from Villanova, the village where a major cemetery was found, and from the Benacci and Arnoaldi estates, whence key finds come. The second centers at Este, near Padua, famous for its bronzesituleor buckets finely decorated by punching from the back, in the technique calledrepoussé. The third is Paolo Orsi’s exemplary work in Sicily and South Italy. The complex chronology is best set out in a tabular view (see facing page).

THE IRON AGE

The cremation cemetery excavated as early as 1853 at Villanova, near Bologna, produced artifacts (ossuary urns,fibulae, razors, hairpins, distaffs, bracelets, fish hooks, tweezers,repoussébronze belts [seeFig. 1.9]) which match objects found later at other sites farther south, in Latium and Etruria; e.g., the village in the process of excavation since 1955 at San Giovenale, near Bieda, by H. M. King Gustav VI of Sweden. Thus the inference is warranted that this whole area was inhabited in the early Iron Age by a people unified in culture. Since the Villanovans, unlike the aborigines, cremated their dead, we infer that they were foreigners, probably invaders; that they descended from theterremarefolk is not proven. That they lived in wattle-and-daub huts roofed with carved beams is inferred from the hut-urns (Fig. 1.10) in which the Southern Villanovans (in Rome and Latium) placed the ashes of their dead. Though these huts show no great advance over those of the Tavoliere orterremare folk, the people who lived in them were skilled artisans, producing fine bronze work. The finest example, from the late Arnoaldi period in Bologna (ca.525B.C.), is the Certosasitula(Fig. 1.11), where the scenes portrayed are so vivid that even a funeral comes to life. In one band is a vignette of rustic festival, where a slave drags a pig by the hind leg, a piper plays, and the lord of the manor ladles his wine while he waits for a dinner of venison. The deer is being brought on a pole by two slaves, while a curly-tailed dog marches beneath.

Fig. 1.9Villanova artifacts.(D. Randall-MacIver,Villanova and Early Etruscans, Pl. 2)

Fig. 1.9Villanova artifacts.

(D. Randall-MacIver,Villanova and Early Etruscans, Pl. 2)

Fig. 1.10A hut-urn.(D. Randall-MacIver,Italy before the Romans, fac. p. 66)

Fig. 1.10A hut-urn.

(D. Randall-MacIver,Italy before the Romans, fac. p. 66)

Three other areas of Iron Age digs are worthy of mention. One is Este, whose culture in general resembles Bologna’s, with fine bronze buckets, belts, and pendants. A second is Golasecca, near Lago Maggiore, where, as at Como, the finds reveal a people making a living as transport agents, forwarding artifacts back and forth between the Transalpine country, Etruria and the Balkans. The graves yield safety-pins, bronze buckets, small jewelry of bronze, iron, amber and glass, horse-bits, chariot-parts, helmets, spears, and swords. A third is the territory of Picenum, on the central Adriatic coast; here the tombs are filled (Fig. 1.12) with maces, greaves, breastplates, even chariots, as might be expected from the ancestors of those thorns in Rome’s flesh,the warlike Samnites. The unique Warrior of Capestrano (Fig. 1.13), found in Picenum, shows how remote Picene culture was, about 500B.C., from the influences affecting the rest of the peninsula.

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Finally, a brief word about Sicily in prehistory. Recent excavations of over 400 graves in the Lipari Islands, and of a Siculan village near Leontini, whose huts have front porches, and otherwise resemble those of Latium, has established closer connections with the mainland than used to be thought possible. But our main knowledge of Siculan culture results from the earlier excavations of Paolo Orsi, near Syracuse, and on either side of the toe of Italy, at Torre Galli and Canale. These provided a model of archaeological method. The following table, resulting from Orsi’s careful observation of the strata in which pots of various fabrics were found in his digs near Syracuse, and of the frequency of their distribution within levels, shows how division into archaeological periods is arrived at. The Geometric ware (the latest) is characteristic of the period he called Siculan III, contemporary with Villanovan of the eighth centuryB.C.

SiteYellowsurfacewareFinegreywareMycenaeanwareRedpolishedwareFeather-patternGeometricSiculanPeriodMilocca+ +—Early IIPlemmirio+Early IICozzo Pantano++—=IIThapsos—+ ++ +IIPantalica, N.=+ +—IICaltagirone=+=+Late IIDessueri=——Late IIPantalica, S.++ ++Early III(= signifies very rare; —, not common; +, not unusual; + +, very common)

(= signifies very rare; —, not common; +, not unusual; + +, very common)

Orsi’s sites at Torre Galli and Canale are urn fields, dated by the Geometric pottery (meander and swastika patterns, the latter perhaps to insure good luck) in the eighth century. They show a trade with Greece 150 years before the first Greek colony was founded in South Italy.

Fig. 1.11The Certosa situla.(D. Randall-MacIver,The Iron Age in Italy, frontispiece)

Fig. 1.11The Certosa situla.

(D. Randall-MacIver,The Iron Age in Italy, frontispiece)

Fig. 1.12Picene tomb-furniture from Fabriano.(F. von Duhn and F. Messerschmidt,Italische Gräberkunde, 2, Pl. 31)

Fig. 1.12Picene tomb-furniture from Fabriano.

(F. von Duhn and F. Messerschmidt,Italische Gräberkunde, 2, Pl. 31)

Fig. 1.13Chieti, Museum. The Warrior of Capestrano. (Italian Ministry of Public Instruction)

If the prehistoric folk who lived on the Tavoliere, in theterremare, and around thenuraghi, if the later Villanovans and Siculans have any reality for us, we owe our insights into their culture to the patience, critical spirit, and intelligence of Bradford, Pigorini’s critics, Lilliu, Ducati, Orsi, and other archaeologists. Their work has pushed back the frontiers of Italian history nearly two millennia, and revealed to us how the energy and capacity for creative borrowing of provincial Italians contributed to the ultimate strength and coherence of the Roman state, or how the Italians fought the Romans when they proved high-handed. To Roman culture of historical times another great contribution was made by the Etruscans.

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