Shortly after the middle of last century certain artificial deposits of an earthy substance found scattered in the shape of large, flattish mounds, over the provinces of Parma, Reggio, and Modena, became known to agriculturists as possessing great fertilising power--a property which they henceforth turned to advantage by using their contents as manure. To such an extent has this practice been carried that many of these deposits, notwithstanding their great extent, covering, in most instances, many acres, have now entirely disappeared. This substance looks like a mixture of clay, sand, ashes, etc., arranged in differently-coloured strata--yellowish-brown, green or black--and goes among the peasants under the name of _marna_ or _mèrne_; but in scientific circles it is generally called terramara, more especially since the meeting of the International Congress at Bologna. In the course of these annual excavations various objects of antiquity were noticed by the workmen, such as Roman coins and tiles; implements of bone, horn, bronze, etc.; the bones of domestic and wild animals; and even human bones, were occasionally turned up. But these popular observations failed to lead to any scientific investigation, and when these mysterious mounds happened to be noticed by the early writers of this century each had a theory of his own to account for them. Thus the celebrated naturalist Venturi, in his "Storia di Scandiano," published in 1822, assigns them partly to the Boii, a Celtic race who here, according to him, cremated their dead warriors and ceremoniously threw their weapons and animals taken in war into the burning pile; and partly to the Romans, who subsequently inhabited the country, and selected these heaps for their dwellings and burial-places. Others supposed them to be the sacred or traditional cemeteries of successive races, and hence their contents are called "terrecime-teriale"; and it is a curious fact that many of these truncated mounds are to this day crowned by a modern church or convent, around which the Christians have been in the habit of burying their dead. Nor did the opinion of Gastaldi, published in 1861 (B. 43), throw much light on the matter. Seeing that the terremare were invariably situated near running streams, he considered them heaps of the remains of different, ages--Roman graves, cremations, and funeral feasts, which had been washed down and re-arranged by floods. But these and similar theories, based on the supposition that they were the abodes of the dead, were not in harmony with the domestic character of the pottery and implements turned up. The starting-point of a long series of researches which have now cleared up the problem was the announcement by Professor Strobel of Parma, in 1861 (B. 44), that the remains of a palafitte, analogous to those found in lakes and marshes, were to be seen below the true terramara deposits at Castione dei Marchesi.