The Mute Stones Speak: The Story of Archaeology in ItalyMacKendrick, Paul Lachlan
History
The Mute Stones Speak: The Story of Archaeology in Italy
MacKendrick, Paul Lachlan
Italy -- Antiquities
[Illustration: FIG. 1.10 A hut-urn.
(D. Randall-MacIver, _Italy before the Romans_, fac. p. 66)]
Three other areas of Iron Age digs are worthy of mention. One is Este,
whose culture in general resembles Bologna’s, with fine bronze buckets,
belts, and pendants. A second is Golasecca, near Lago Maggiore, where,
as at Como, the finds reveal a people making a living as transport
agents, forwarding artifacts back and forth between the Transalpine
country, Etruria and the Balkans. The graves yield safety-pins, bronze
buckets, small jewelry of bronze, iron, amber and glass, horse-bits,
chariot-parts, helmets, spears, and swords. A third is the territory
of Picenum, on the central Adriatic coast; here the tombs are filled
(Fig. 1.12) with maces, greaves, breastplates, even chariots, as might
be expected from the ancestors of those thorns in Rome’s flesh, the
warlike Samnites. The unique Warrior of Capestrano (Fig. 1.13), found
in Picenum, shows how remote Picene culture was, about 500 _B.C._, from
the influences affecting the rest of the peninsula.
* * * * *
Finally, a brief word about Sicily in prehistory. Recent excavations of
over 400 graves in the Lipari Islands, and of a Siculan village near
Leontini, whose huts have front porches, and otherwise resemble those
of Latium, has established closer connections with the mainland than
used to be thought possible. But our main knowledge of Siculan culture
results from the earlier excavations of Paolo Orsi, near Syracuse,
and on either side of the toe of Italy, at Torre Galli and Canale.
These provided a model of archaeological method. The following table,
resulting from Orsi’s careful observation of the strata in which pots
of various fabrics were found in his digs near Syracuse, and of the
frequency of their distribution within levels, shows how division into
archaeological periods is arrived at. The Geometric ware (the latest)
is characteristic of the period he called Siculan III, contemporary
with Villanovan of the eighth century B.C.
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