DISCOVERY 



237 



by Herodotus, and once more archaeology has shown 

 how accurate and trustworthy an observer was the 

 much maligned Father of History. The form of these 

 settlements differs, it will be noticed, from the crannogs 

 of Ireland and Scotland, or the lake-village at Glaston- 

 bury. In the British Islands the lake-\'illage was 

 constructed upon a natural or artificial island, material 

 being heaped up to form a foundation. The Italian 

 lake-villages, however, consist of houses built upon 

 rectangular platforms, which are erected upon piles 

 driven into the bed of the lake. Their position is 

 one of great strength for defence, as Megabazus 

 evidently found, for they are cut off from the land 

 by a narrow causeway sometimes of considerable 

 length.' 



The Neolithic people were pastoral. They lived by 

 hunting or fishing and from the animals which they 

 had domesticated, the ox, sheep, goat, horse, and ass. 

 It is probable that they used the fruit of wild plants 

 for food, but there is no evidence that the}' had arrived 

 at the stage of agriculture. Remains of cultivated 

 plants, however, have been found in the ruins of the 

 lake-dwellings - ; and the presence of spindle whorls 

 show^s that man was no longer dependent solely upon 

 skins for his clothing. The use of metal, a true bronze, 

 not copper, first appears in Italy with this people. 

 One would expect further that lake-dwellers would 

 develop some means of navigation, and in fact the 

 remains of their canoes have been found. They are 

 of a primitive kind, hollowed from the solid tree trunk 

 and propelled by paddles. The essential differences 

 between the mode of hfe of the lake-dwellers and those 

 of the previous inhabitants of Italy make it certain 

 that the lake-dwellers represent an intrusive people ; 

 while the similarity of the structure and contents of 

 their villages built upon piles to those of the lake- 

 dwellers of Central Europe shows us unmistakably 

 whence they came. 



Some time later in the Bronze Age than the early 

 settlements on the Italian Lakes the basin of the Upper 

 Danube became once more the centre of a movement 

 of peoples who spread from their native valleys over 

 Hungary, Bosnia, and Northern Italy. To this wave 

 of invasion belong the later settlements on Lake Garda 

 and the terremare. For the new-comers were akin 

 to the previous invaders and, hke them, were builders 

 of pile-villages. So marked, in fact, is this character- 

 istic of their existence that when they spread from the 

 lakes to the dry land, they continued faithful to their 



' In the lake-village of Polada (Lake Garda), the double row 

 of piles which supported the causeway connecting the settle- 

 ment with the land is lOo yards in length. 



* The evidence is not sufficiently trustworthy to make it 

 certain that they were agriculturists before their invasion 

 of Italy, but quite early in the Bronze Age they cultivated 

 com and millet. 



old method of architecture. For the ierramara,' as 

 it is called, is the lake-village built upon dry land. 

 Its form and orientation are uniform ; though it may 

 vary in size, in shape it is always a more or less regular 

 quadrilateral (in fact, trapezoidal), and its eastern 

 and western sides are roughly parallel and run north 

 and south. It is surrounded by a moat and an em- 

 bankment of earth supported on its inner side by a 

 buttress constructed of wooden beams. The moat is 

 fed by a channel from the nearest convenient running 

 water. The channel discharges on to the acute comer 

 of the embankment, which divides its waters to flow 

 round each side of the moat, while the channel itself 

 is curved just before its junction with the moat in order 

 to lessen the force of the current and the strain upon 

 the rampart. The water is carried off again by a 

 trench about midway on the east side of- the moat. 

 Within the quadrilateral formed by the rampart and 

 moat the area is divided by two main roads at right 

 angles to each other running north and south and east 

 and west respectively. The obvious similarity to the 

 arrangement of a Roman camp goes even further, for 

 the principal street is double the width of that which 

 runs east and west. The entrance to the settlement 

 was by a bridge over the moat at the southern end of 

 the principal street. With the exception of the citadel, 

 the interior of the quadrilateral was covered with 

 houses built upon platforms exactly after the manner 

 of the lake- villages, except that the piles rested not 

 upon the bed of a lake, but upon dry land. In the 

 centre of the eastern half of the quadrilateral and 

 approached by the road which bisects it east and west 

 is the citadel. This had sometimes a moat and 

 rampart of its owti, and was entered b}- a bridge in the 

 centre of its western face. It consisted of a rectangular 

 artificial mound of solid earth and contains no traces 

 of pile structures upon it, but in its centre and on the 

 line of the road of approach there is a trench with 

 ritual pits similar to those found in some Roman camps. 

 The question has naturally been asked as to the 

 reason for this pecuhar mode of building ; the answer 

 is simply conservatism. It was at one time suggested 

 that dread of inundation had led to the persistence 

 of the type after the builders had left their original 

 homes. The fact, however, that a moat of running 

 water is a poor defence against flood suggested diffi- 

 culties in this view, which has been finally disposed 

 of by the discovery of terremare upon hilltops where 

 the alleged reason cannot apply. On the other hand, 

 their conservatism was not pushed so far as was at 



' Terramara (plural terremare) is the label which has been 

 adopted to denote a settlement of this type. Before the dis- 

 covery of their real nature, the soil from the mounds, which 

 were in fact the remains of these settlements, was extensively 

 used by the Italian peasant for manure. This fertiliser he 

 called terra marna or terra mara. 



