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Early Italy (Bronze Age)

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The system which has evolved to catalogue the various archaeological expressions of human progress is one which involves cultures. The task of cataloguing the vast range of human cultures which emerged from Africa and the Near East right up until human expansion reached the Americas is covered in the related feature (see link, right).

Following the first entry into Early Italy of anatomically modern humans, subsequent cultural complexity appeared and increased as human populations increased. What had been a single human culture across Europe eventually divided in two which - at least at first - can be equated to Northern Europe and Southern Europe.

Within the latter region, early Greece formed a southern zone below the Balkans. Covering a wider area than today's nation state of the same name, it comprised modern Greece, North Macedonia, southern Bulgaria and part of Albania. The region's role in human development played a minimal role in the Mesolithic, but a far greater role in the subsequent Greek Neolithic.

The late Palaeolithic Epigravettian culture emerged across much of Italy, the Balkans, and western Ukraine. When this entered the Mesolithic period regional variations had already begun to appear, sparking the start of a series of local cultures in Greece and Eastern Europe.

The people of Iron Age Greece had been working bronze for some five hundred years and there existed extensive contacts between Mycenaeans and the populations in Italy. Two Mycenaean trading posts are known to have existed at Scoglio del Tonno in the heel of Italy, near Tarentum, and at Lipari in the Aeolian islands to the north of Sicily.

Mycenaean pottery has been found at sites all over Italy, including Rome, but the archaeological record does not indicate any Mycenaean presence much before 1400 BC so it is highly unlikely that the Mycenaeans taught the Italians bronze-working. A much more likely candidate for southern Italian exposure to this development is to be found in the Minoans.

Bronze Age Italy

It was in 1854 that the boatmen of Meilen, on Lake Zurich, while the lake was in a very dry condition, discovered the first signs of pile-dwellings in Europe. The success of the explorations of the next few years in Switzerland led Mortillet in 1860 to ask for similar researches in the lakes of Lombardy. In that same year the first Italian pile-dwellings was discovered in the peat-bog of Mercurago, and others soon followed in Lakes Varese, Garda and Fimon. In fact it transpired that the early age of bronze in North Italy was essentially an age of lake-dwellings. It is these structures which we have now to describe.
The distribution of the lake-dwellings in Italy is naturally very limited. ion. These new-comers, assuming them to be such for the present, founded their first settlements on Lakes Maggiore, Varese and Como. Afterwards they spread east and west, and, keeping always to the lakes and marshy ground, reached on the west side Trana, slightly beyond Turin, while on the east they reached the province of Brescia and the south-west corner of Lake Garda. Either these same people or another branch of the same race also penetrated the Veneto and formed pile-dwellings on Lakes Fimon and Arqua, and at Cascina Veronese.

We begin, therefore, with Lake Maggiore. In the lower Maggiore. part of the lake a number of lake-dwellings have been discovered along both east and west banks, and more especially in the peat-bogs to the South, which, presumably, once formed part of the lake itself.

The most important of these lake-dwellings are those of Mercurago and Lagozza. The peat-bog of Mercurago (Map II, 72) has preserved for us the remains of a palafitta or pile-structure. The deposit of peat is 2 metres in thickness, and is separated from the ancient mud-bottom of the lake by a layer of fern. Only a small area was examined, but twenty-two piles were found in position together with a number of horizontal crossbeams.

The piles were driven more than a metre into the lake-bottom and rise an equal distance into the peat above. The objects found were bronze daggers and pins, flint arrowheads, pottery of a blackish paste mixed with coarse sand, a soap- stone spindle-whorl, and sixteen conical beads of glass- wooden paste.

The excavations on these two sites show that at an early period of the bronze age the southern shores of Lake Maggiore were inhabited by lake-dwellers. These people built settlements, rectangular in form, upon piles which they drove into the lake-bed, where the water was compara- tively shallow. Though they were not ignorant of the use of bronze the metal was apparently rare among them, and the majority of their implements were of flint and stone.

That they were an agricultural people is clear from the seeds of cultivated plants found among the remains, and the spindle-whorls used for spinning flax [POSSIBLY NEOLITHIC FARMERS BEING PUSHED SOUTHWARDS BY WEST IE ARRIVALS, ALTHOUGH THIS ISN'T NECESSARILY THE CASE AS EARLY BRONZE AGE SETTLEMENTS NEEDN'T HAVE MUCH ACTUAL BRONZE]

The animal bones found prove that they were a hunting as well as a pastoral people.

As early as 1851 dredging operations in the harbour of Peschiera (Map II, 96), at the south end of the lake, had brought to light a number of bronze implements on the lake-bottom among the upper ends of piles. It was not until 1864 that a scientific report on the settlements was published by Von Sacken. The stratification dealt with is as follows. Five feet of water followed by three feet of sand containing no remains ; below this lay the archaeological stratum, from 2 to 3 feet thick, containing vegetable remains, industrial products, and the tops of piles ; below this again the prehistoric lake-bed into which the piles were driven. The area of the palafitta could not be ascertained, but was at least 10,000 square yards. The piles were usually of pine or oak, and among the vegetable remains were those of rye and of the vine. The bones found were those of the stag, roebuck, wild boar, dog, sheep, goat, horse and pig.

The great importance of this settlement is that it was inhabited through two successive periods, the full bronze age and the early iron age. The material has been specially examined by Pigorini,^ who gives the following results of his study.

The pile-dwellings of Peschiera represent two distinct periods, the bronze age and the iron age. The presence of rye, of amber, and of objects which are rare or lacking in the terramara strata of the bronze age, but which occur in the iron age strata which overlie them, shows that the inhabitants of the pile-dwellings of Peschiera were still there when the iron age began. However, as objects of this later period are comparatively rare, it is probable that the settlement only just survived the bronze age. The bronze implements of Peschiera are closely akin to those of the terremare, and have numerous parallels in the Danube Valley and in Hungary.

The pottery resembles that of the terremare, and is of two types, rough and fine. Vases of the finer type are sometimes polished, but the work is on the whole inferior to that of the terremare. Ansa lunata is common, while tongue- shaped protuberances and tubular handles are not un- usual. Ornament consists of simple relief work, sharp incisions, and broad shallow furrows in the terramara fashion.

We have now described the chief lake-dwellings of North Italy, and it remains to ask whether they form a homogeneous group, and to what period or periods they must be assigned. They are divided by Pigorini into two groups, eastern and a western. ' I am inclined to think,' that the pile-dwellings of the Po Valley, despite theory, evident existence of relations between them, should be divided into two groups, an eastern and a western, groups. representing perhaps two different branches of the same people.'

The western group consists of the lake-dwellings of Lombardy and Piedmont, and the eastern includes those of the Veneto and also the terremare. In 1889 The eastern Pigorini stated ^ that ' The material coming from the terre- lerremare. mare is perfectly identical with that found in the lake- dweUings of the Veneto, while it varies considerably from that found in those of Lombardy and Piedmont '. He therefore supposed that the western group was due to an invasion from the direction of Switzerland, while the eastern group, including the terremare, was due to a later invasion by another branch of the same people from the Danube Valley, an invasion which flooded Hungary, Bosnia, North- East Italy, Croatia, and even Lower Austria.

Now it is true that, as a whole, the eastern group including terremare is later than the western, but there are two lake-dwellings of the eastern group which differ materially from the rest, those of Fimon and Arqua.

I confess I am unable to follow Pigorini when he makes the statement above quoted that the material of the terremare is the same as that of the true lake-dwellings of the Veneto.

If the only lake-dwellings in question were those of the Lake Garda I would readily agree, but they are not. The material of Eimon and Arqua appears to be much older and more primitive than that of the terremare.

What seems decisive is the pottery. The typical pottery of the terremare is a good black polished ware, almost a bucchero, usually ornamented with simple designs in broad furrows. Of this I have, despite careful search, been unable to find a single fragment in either Arqua or Fimon. Nor is it possible to avoid the conclusion implied by this fact by supposing that the black polished ware was developed by these people after they left the lakes and moved south to build terremare in the Po Valley, for that they brought it into Italy with them is shown by its occurrence in both Hungary and Bosnia, where famihes of the terramara folk settled during the great march which for some of them ended in Italy.

How, then, could we account for the fact that the developed forms do not occur at Fimon and Arqua, but do occur at Ripac and Donja Dohna in Bosnia? Donja Dohna, it is true, is later than most terremare, but the finding of the various strange terramara handles there in the exact Italian forms can only mean that they were part of the inheritance of the great terramara folk before they left the Danube valley and split up to colonise Bosnia, Italy and other countries, and therefore Arqua and Fimon cannot belong to this invasion at all.

It seems more rational to explain the phenomena of the North Italian bronze age as follows. A first invasion, possibly at two points, east and west, brings the people who built all the lake-dwellings except perhaps those of Garda ; a second and later invasion brings the people who made the terremare and perhaps the lake-dweUings of Garda.

Treating the lake-dwellings as a single group, and excluding those of Lake Garda, which are certainly later, we must now ask what is to be gathered as to the life and early civilization of the early bronze age lake-dwellings in North
Italy.

Terramare

It was in agriculture and metallurgy that they chiefly surpassed their neohthic predecessors in Italy. Wild fruits still served as food, such as filberts, acorns, wild apples, pears and cherries. But besides these we find remains of flax, beans, two types of wheat (Triticum vulgare hibernum and turbidum), and the vine (Vitis vinifera L.). This last, however, is not the true vine of cultivation, and we have no evidence that these people used it to produce wine.

The grain was pounded with hand-mills of stone of the type of fig. 201. The flax was probably used, as in Switzerland to produce clothing-stuffs. The abundance of the spindle- whorls proves that it was at least made into thread.

The metallic industry of the terramara folk consisted in the casting of bronze in stone and perhaps clay moulds.

The art of hammering out bronze plate in order to make bronze vases was unknown to them, and appears in Italy only when the civilization of the terremare has passed into that of Villanova. Moulds for casting bronze objects are not rare among the terremare. They are generally of sandstone or limestone (PI. V, 13). We have also crucibles of cylindrical form, in which the metal was fused.

But while the terramara folk practised agriculture and worked bronze, they had not ceased to be hunters. They still relied on the chase to provide for many of the needs of everyday life. They pursued the stag, deer, wild boar and bear. These animals furnished them with horn and bone for making implements, with skins to clothe themselves, and with flesh to eat. Many animals, however, they had domesticated, including the ox, sheep, goat, pig, cat, fowl and duck. The dog helped to watch the cattle, and the horse and perhaps the ass were driven in the modern fashion, with reins and bits.
 

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(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information from A Genetic Signal of Central European Celtic Ancestry, David K Faux, from Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission, Benjamin W Roberts & Marc Vander Linden (Eds), from The Magdalenian Settlement of Europe, Quaternary International Volumes 272-273 (2012), and from External Links: The Genetic History of Ice Age Europe (Nature 2016), and Dietary Change from the Mesolithic to the Middle Ages in the Iron Gates, C Bonsall (Lead Author, Cambridge University Press, 18 July 2016), and Neolithic and Bronze Age People in Italy (Facts and Details).)