In 1893 he announced the discovery, within the rampart, halfway along its east side, of a mound in a reserved area or templum (G), surrounded by its own ditch; in 1894 this templum became the arx, 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. 1.7 Su Nuraxi, a Sardinian nuraghe. (Illustrated London News)
BURIAL RITES
in the
EARLY IRON AGE
Fig. 1.8 Cremating 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 (cardines and decumani), 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 the terremare folk 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 some terremare (modern investigators enumerate ten), many sites are oval, not unlike Bradford’s Tavoliere hut-settlements. In fact the terremare plan varies more than Pigorini was willing to admit. Furthermore, parallel in date to the terremare are unmoated hut villages and true lake dwellings. (The terremare are 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 the terremare are Bronze Age pigsties. One site has an area of thirty-five acres, which is a bit large for a pigsty.
The terremare are 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 1500 B.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 the terremare, for dogs as well, described by Randall-MacIver as “doubtless good woolly animals of a fair size.”