Terramare culture

This article is about the technology complex of north Italy. For other uses, see Black earth (disambiguation).
Terramare culture
Geographical rangeNorthern Italy
PeriodBronze Age
Datesc. 1650 — c. 1150 BC
Major sitesTerramare of Montale
Preceded byPolada culture
Followed byProto-Villanovan culture
Bronze Age
Europe (c. 3200 – 600 BC)
Aegean (Cycladic, Minoan, Mycenaean), Bronze Age Balkans

Vučedol culture, Nagyrév culture, Ottomány culture, Wietenberg culture, Vatya culture

Bell Beaker culture, Únětice culture, Nordic Bronze Age, Tumulus culture, Urnfield culture

Bronze Age Britain, Bronze Age France, Armorican Tumulus culture, Bronze Age Iberia, Argaric culture, Hilversum culture, Atlantic Bronze Age

Nuragic civilization, Polada culture, Terramare culture, Proto-Villanovan culture, Apennine culture, Canegrate culture, Golasecca culture

Bronze Age Caucasus, Catacomb culture, Poltavka culture, Abashevo culture, Sintashta culture, Andronovo culture, Multi-cordoned ware culture, Srubnaya culture

Terramare, terramara, or terremare is a technology complex mainly of the central Po valley, in Emilia, Northern Italy,[1] dating to the Middle and Late Bronze Age c. 1700–1150 BC.[2][3] 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.[2] The population of the terramare sites is called the terramaricoli. The sites were excavated exhaustively in 1860–1910.[4]

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.[5]

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.

  1. ^ "Map of the Terramare culture". Nuke.costumilombardi.it. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  2. ^ a b Pearce, Mark (December 1, 1998). "New research on the terramare of northern Italy". Antiquity. 72 (278): 743–746. doi:10.1017/S0003598X00087317. S2CID 160050623.
  3. ^ "Terramare culture - ancient culture". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  4. ^ Rykwert, Joseph (1999). The idea of a town: the anthropology of urban form in Rome, Italy and the ancient world (4th ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 73. ISBN 978-0262680561.
  5. ^ Menotti, Francesco (2004). Living on the lake in prehistoric Europe: 150 years of lake-dwelling research (illustrated ed.). Routledge. pp. 84–85. ISBN 978-0415317191.