In a later phase, after the Carthaginian invasion, the huts have fan-shaped rooms, each devoted to a specialized occupation, baking, oil-pressing, stone-tool making. A pair of stone boot-trees, or shoe-lasts, presumably from a cobbler’s shop, was one of the more curious finds. Gewgaws in glass paste, poor, decadent, commercialized, but traditional in design, testify to the material and aesthetic poverty of this period. Only the last phase yielded tombs, but a huge stele with a curved top may have marked the entrance to what the peasants call a Giant’s Grave, a Stone Age slab-edged tomb, forming a corridor sometimes as much as twenty yards along, from which two wings branch off to form a semicircular approach.
This scientific dig provides a fixed foundation for future research into earlier ages on Sardinia. Lilliu is understandably excited about the “dynamic spirit” revealed by the creators of this amazingly early massiveness, but like all massiveness, whether of pyramid, ziggurat, or Roman Imperial palace, it undoubtedly justifies the unhappy inference that with all this grandeur went autocracy.
* * * * *
Perhaps the mainland political system in the early Iron Age was less rigid; at any rate it can boast no architectural remains as sophisticated as the Sardinian nuraghi. But the artifacts, especially from graves, are more numerous than for the Bronze or Neolithic Ages, and the graves show that roughly speaking the peninsula was divided in the early Iron Age between two cultures ([Fig. 1.8]): the folk west of a line drawn from Rome to Bimini cremated their dead; those east of that line inhumed them. In and near Rome the two burial rites are mingled: the significant inference from this fact will be explained later. Because the finds are so much more numerous on the mainland, the resulting inferences involve a much more complex subdivision into cultures and periods. We may single out three sets of inferences, based primarily on three major archaeological efforts. The first is Pericle Ducati’s work at Bologna, which distinguished four cultural phases, named from Villanova, the village where a major cemetery was found, and from the Benacci and Arnoaldi estates, whence key finds come. The second centers at Este, near Padua, famous for its bronze situle or buckets finely decorated by punching from the back, in the technique called repoussé. The third is Paolo Orsi’s exemplary work in Sicily and South Italy. The complex chronology is best set out in a tabular view (see facing page).
THE IRON AGE
| DATES B.C. | ITALY | SICILY | GREECE & AEGAEAN | ||
| North | Central | South | |||
| 900 | Proto-Villanovan | Torre Galli, Canale | | Siculan III. | | Troy VIII Geometric pottery | |
| 850 | Benacci I | | | | | | | ||
| 800 | Early Etruscans | ↓ | ↓ | ||
| 750 | Benacci II | Alban & Forum graves | Pantalica South | ||
| 700 | Gk. col., Syracuse | Orientalizing pottery | |||
| 650 | Arnoaldi | | Etruscan tombs | |||
| 600 | ↓ | Rise of Carth. Empire. | |||
| 550 | | ||||
| 500 | Marzabotto | Roman republic. Capestrano warrior | Black-figure ware Troy IX | ||
| 450 | Red-figure ware | ||||
| 400 | La Tène Culture | ||||
The cremation cemetery excavated as early as 1853 at Villanova, near Bologna, produced artifacts (ossuary urns, fibulae, razors, hairpins, distaffs, bracelets, fish hooks, tweezers, repoussé bronze belts [see [Fig. 1.9]]) which match objects found later at other sites farther south, in Latium and Etruria; e.g., the village in the process of excavation since 1955 at San Giovenale, near Bieda, by H. M. King Gustav VI of Sweden. Thus the inference is warranted that this whole area was inhabited in the early Iron Age by a people unified in culture. Since the Villanovans, unlike the aborigines, cremated their dead, we infer that they were foreigners, probably invaders; that they descended from the terremare folk is not proven. That they lived in wattle-and-daub huts roofed with carved beams is inferred from the hut-urns ([Fig. 1.10]) in which the Southern Villanovans (in Rome and Latium) placed the ashes of their dead. Though these huts show no great advance over those of the Tavoliere or terremare folk, the people who lived in them were skilled artisans, producing fine bronze work. The finest example, from the late Arnoaldi period in Bologna (ca. 525 B.C.), is the Certosa situla ([Fig. 1.11]), where the scenes portrayed are so vivid that even a funeral comes to life. In one band is a vignette of rustic festival, where a slave drags a pig by the hind leg, a piper plays, and the lord of the manor ladles his wine while he waits for a dinner of venison. The deer is being brought on a pole by two slaves, while a curly-tailed dog marches beneath.
Fig. 1.9 Villanova artifacts.
(D. Randall-MacIver, Villanova and Early Etruscans, Pl. 2)