Terramare culture

Bronze Age This box:
↑ Chalcolithic
Near East (c. 3300–1200 BC) Anatolia, Caucasus, Elam, Egypt, Levant, Mesopotamia, Sistan, Canaan Bronze Age collapse South Asia (c. 3000– 1200 BC) Ochre Coloured Pottery Cemetery H Europe (c. 3200–600 BC) Aegean, Caucasus, Catacomb culture, Minoan, Srubna culture, Beaker culture, Unetice culture, Tumulus culture, Urnfield culture, Hallstatt culture, Apennine culture, Canegrate culture, Golasecca culture, Atlantic Bronze Age, Bronze Age Britain, Nordic Bronze Age China (c. 2000–700 BC) Erlitou, Erligang
arsenical bronze writing, literature sword, chariot
↓Iron Age

Near East (c. 3300–1200 BC)

South Asia (c. 3000– 1200 BC)

Europe (c. 3200–600 BC)

China (c. 2000–700 BC)

arsenical bronze
writing, literature
sword, chariot

Terramare, Terramara, or Terremare is a technology complex mainly of the central Po valley, in Emilia-Romagna, Northern Italy, dating to the Middle and Late Bronze Age ca. 1700–1150 BC. It takes its name from the "black earth" residue of settlement mounds. Terramare is from terra marna, "marl-earth", where marl is a deposit. It may be any color but in agricultural lands it is most typically black, giving rise to the "black earth" identification of it. The population of the terramare sites is called the terramaricoli. The sites were excavated exhaustively in 1860–1910.

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.

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.

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