Pigorini apparently dug isolated, random trenches rather than the continuous ones which would have enabled him to trace a ground-plan securely. It is hard to see, without more evidence than he supplies, how the grandiose grid of his ultimate plan (Fig. 1.6) could be deduced from the disconnected series of trenches figured on his earliest one. Though he had to contend with the most vexatious swampy conditions, working in the midst of constant seepage and ubiquitous mud, in which a rectangular grid could hardly have survived, he was nevertheless able to persuade himself, at Castellazzo, of the existence of a ditch and a rampart, reinforced by wooden piling. (Post-holes and piles he certainly found, and photographed.) By 1892 he had convinced himself that his site had a trapezoidal plan, surrounded by a ramparted ditch thirty yards wide and ten feet deep. (Some of his dimensions suggest a prehistoric unit of measure in multiples of five; others a foreshadowing of the Roman foot of twenty-nine centimeters.) Running water derived from a tributary of the Po supplied the hypothetical ditch, which was crossed on the south by a wooden drawbridge thirty yards wide and sixty yards long. South of the site Pigorini claimed to have found a cemetery (M) perfectly square in plan, for cremation urn-burials, and westward another, rectangular one. 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. [Illustration: FIG. 1.7 Su Nuraxi, a Sardinian _nuraghe_. (_Illustrated London News_)] [Illustration: 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.