New research on the terramare of northern Italy.

Pearce, Mark

Sixty years ago, in a note and a book review for ANTIQUITY, David Randall MacIver (1939a; 1939b) was able to write that Gosta Saflund's (1939) monograph on the terramare showed that Pigorini's famous 'Terramare theory', which saw these sites as dry-land lake villages and the forerunners of classical Rome, was dead. In reality Saflund's deconstruction did more than that: by totally discrediting the work of the 19th-century Italian pioneers of prehistoric archaeology it caused a total loss of nerve and a suspension of work on these north Italian sites. Only recently has research taken off again, and two important recent exhibitions, one in Parma (12 May-30 November 1994, catalogue Bernabo Brea & Mutti 1994), the other in Modena reviewing current research (15 March-1 June 1997, catalogue Bernabo Brea et al. 1997), have marked a new stage in maturity in their study. Whilst the Parma exhibition concentrated on the 19th-century pioneers and their milieu, the Modena exhibition catalogue contains a collection of essays by the leading workers in the field, with comparative material from both northern Italy and Europe: it is likely to remain an important source for many years.

The terramare of the Middle and Recent Bronze Age (c. 1700-1150 BC) central Po plain take their name from a dialect term used for the organically-rich earth - terra marna - of mounds (tells) quarried as fertilizer in the 19th century (and hence the title of the Parma exhibition catalogue (Bernabo Brea & Mutti 1994)). In Italian prehistory the term is now used to denote banked and ditched Bronze Age villages, generally quadrangular in plan, in the central Po plain, mostly found in the modern Emilia sub-region. The wooden structures built within them varied, sometimes being constructed on piles, sometimes on the ground itself. More than 60 villages were built, and in the middle phase of the Middle Bronze Age their density reached one site per 25 sq. km. Whilst in their early phases the terramare are usually no bigger than 2 ha, the Recent Bronze Age sees the abandonment of many sites and others reach quite considerable dimensions: Santa Rosa di Poviglio goes from 1 to 7 ha, Fondo Paviani is 16 ha and Case del Lago 22.5 ha; the outer enclosure at Case Cocconi is 60 ha.

The terramare lie at the very origins of prehistoric research in Italy (Desittere 1984; 1991; Guidi 1988; Peroni 1992; Peroni & Magnani 1996) and it was in their excavation that the three great pioneers of the discipline in Italy emerged - Luigi Pigorini, Pellegrino Strobel and Gaetano Chierici. Although Pigorini became the most famous and is generally associated with the notorious 'Terramare theory', Strobel, a naturalist, was arguably the ablest of the three, and was the focus of the 1994 Parma exhibition: a professor of Natural History, he pioneered snail and bone reports.

Saflund (1939) rubbished Pigorini comprehensively, questioning both his ideas and his archaeological competence, but work since the war, starting with the reorganization of collections and then excavations of terramare, has rather tended to confirm the accuracy of the recording of the 19th-century workers: indeed the 1997 exhibition at Modena provided a vindication of the pioneers.

A number of key field projects are reported in the catalogue (Bernabo Brea et al. 1997): these include the area excavation at Santa Rosa di Poviglio by Maria Bernabo Brea and Mauro Cremaschi [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] and the intensive field survey by Armando De Guio, Ruth Whitehouse and John Wilkins in an area just to the north of the Po, the Valli Grandi Veronesi (this latter usefully documented by English language interims in the Accordia Research Papers (passim)). It is clear that the terramare were complex settlements, with elements of town planning and in some cases - notably the Enza valley studied by Andrea Cardarelli and the Valli Grandi Veronesi - it is possible to reconstruct polities.

Fuscagni's (1992) study of Wolfgang Helbig (which contains an Italian translation of his important book of 1879) threw into light a new aspect of the origins of Pigorini's 'Terramare theory', according to which the Italic peoples entered Italy from the north, founding first the lake villages of the pre-Alpine lakes and then the terramare; after crossing the Apennines they went on to found Rome, which they built following the same principles of town planning that they had used to build the terramare (cf. Randall MacIver 1939a; Peroni 1992: 32). Indeed, it now seems likely that this model, which dominated Italian prehistoric thought until the early 1930s, was directly inspired by Helbig (Pearce & Gabba 1995.)

It may be useful to review briefly the major advances and themes of recent terramare research. The present crop of publication owes its origin to a work-group which sought to resolve the many problems left unsolved by Saflund's (1939) monograph: first among these his inadequate chronology. This work began with the revision of old excavation material (e.g. the publication by Mutti et el. 1988 of the material from Strobel and Pigorini's excavations at Castione Marchesi; [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]), and has led to the formulation of a closely argued chronology, tested by excavation (the section at Montale was re-opened for the excursions of the 1996 Forli UISPP congress and exhibited at Modena.) Unfortunately the chronology worked out north of the Po, where a number of similar sites have been recently excavated, does not wholly correlate with that for the terramare, and indeed the whole problem of the relationship between the terramare sensu stricto [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED] and the palafitte (lake villages) and similar sites to the north is not really satisfactorily resolved.

Equally problematic is the apparent similarity - first noticed by Pigorini (1876) - of certain aspects of the terramare with the Bronze Age Hungarian tells: this includes horse-bits, metalwork, pottery motifs and the close similarity between the tells and the terramare themselves (Peroni 1989: 129,323). Another unsolved problem regards why some structures within the terramare were raised on piles, even where not apparently at risk from flooding: the 19th-century hypothesis that this was a cultural trait inherited from the lake villages has not been convincingly refuted.

Although the evidence is poor, we have a growing picture of the burial practices of the terramare people. Whereas Patroni (1937: 848-51), a critic of Pigorini and the source for much of Saflund's material, famously characterized terramare society as primitive communism because of the lack of grave goods, it is now clear that much can be learnt from the presence of fragments of cremated bronzes, and comparison with our knowledge of burial rites to the north of the Po.

Perhaps the biggest problem, however, lies in the lack of a satisfactory explanation for the collapse of the terramare (c. 1200 BC). Saflund (1939: 237), who followed a low chronology, was able to explain their disappearance - which he dated at 800 BC - with the climatic deterioration of the sub-Atlantic, whilst Raffaele De Marinis (1975) pointed out that the systems collapse of the Late Bronze Age east Mediterranean seems to have been a broadly parallel event. Although in terms of an archaeological time-scale the abandonment seems to have been rapid, it probably took about a generation: a multi-causal explanation, citing environmental collapse and over-population, as well as political upheaval, has now emerged.

References

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