Fig. 1.10 A 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 500 B.C., from the influences affecting the rest of the peninsula.
* * * * *
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 century B.C.
| Site | Yellow surface ware | Fine grey ware | Mycenaean ware | Red polished ware | Feather- pattern | Geometric | Siculan Period |
| Milocca | + + | — | Early II | ||||
| Plemmirio | + | Early II | |||||
| Cozzo Pantano | + | + | — | = | II | ||
| Thapsos | — | + + | + + | II | |||
| Pantalica, N. | = | + + | — | II | |||
| Caltagirone | = | + | = | + | Late II | ||
| Dessueri | = | — | — | Late II | |||
| Pantalica, S. | + | + + | + | Early III |
(= 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.
