238 



DISCOVERY 



one time suggested by others ; for the facts refute the 

 theory that the quadrilateral within the rampart was 

 flooded to form an artificial lake.' There is little doubt 

 that the object of the moat and rampart was to provide 

 defence, not against floods, but against human enemies ; 

 and that the houses within continued to be built 

 upon piles simply because of ancestral fashion. The 

 conservatism of this people indeed showed itself even 

 to excess in the matter of sanitation. Upon the lake, 

 the refuse of the house was naturally thrown over- 

 board, and no doubt the ground-bait, which in this v.-ay 

 descended through the trap-door, assisted in procuring 

 the marvellous draughts of fishes which aroused the 

 admiration of Herodotus. Apparently, when the 

 village was transferred from the water to the land 

 the housewives continued their old practices. Refuse 

 was just dumped below the houses until the accumula- 

 tion reached the top of the piles. When affairs reached 

 this stage, drastic measures became necessary. The 

 whole affair, refuse, platform, and houses, was set on 

 fire and a new settlement re-erected upon the ashes of 

 the old. 



The lerramara people burned their dead in open fires 

 and buried the ashes in urns. Two characteristics, 

 however, distinguish their burial customs from those 

 of the earlier lake-dwellers. The burial of objects for 

 use of the dead man in the next world is with them the 

 exception rather than the rule. The second and most 

 remarkable pecuharity is the close packing of the urns, 

 which in a lerramara cemetery are placed touching one 

 another, and in some cases even in two layers one on 

 top of the other. For obvious reasons the burials 

 in the same layer cannot all have taken place simul- 

 taneously, and it follows that the urns can hardly have 

 been buried deeper than to the neck or such close con- 

 tiguity would have been impossible. The cemeteries 

 were outside and at a little distance from the settle- 

 ments of the living. In one case, at Castellazzo, the 

 cemetery itself is in the form of a lerramara. The 

 ossuaries are not placed upon the earth, but upon a 

 platform supported by piles and surrounded by a moat 

 ten metres wide, which was crossed by a wooden bridge 

 over its western side. 



Although a lerramara has been found even as far 

 south as Taranto, the distribution of this civilisation 

 is in the main confined to the country north of the 

 Apennines. There is little doubt, however, that its 

 authors moved south in the Iron Age and that the so- 

 called " Villanova culture " is not that of a new race, 

 but belongs to the lerramara people in a new stage of 

 their development. A branch of this people which 



' On p. 228 of Professor Myres's wonderful little book The 

 Dawn of History will be found a sentence which I think implies 

 this view. If so it is misleading ; for there is no doubt about 

 the facts as regards existing tcrremare. Sec Pcet, The Stone and 

 Bronze Ages in Italy, p. 338. 



passed into Central Italy became the ancestors of the 

 Romans ; and it is no mere accident that the general 

 plan of the lerramara-sctt\emcnt presents so many 

 analogies to the way in which the Roman camps were 

 laid out.» 



The account, therefore, of the lake- village which 

 Herodotus gives, in itself interesting and curious, 

 has for us a yet more curious interest than it had for 

 the original narrator and his audience. For it is 

 nothing more or less than the first and, I believe, the 

 only first-hand description drawn from life of one of 

 the lake-villages of the Central European type exactly 

 similar to those in which the ancestors of the Romans 

 must once have lived.' 



' " Old habits of life die hard, as we know ; far beyond the 

 Apennines, and in the age of iron, Roman armies fortified 

 their nightly camps with a ditch and wooden palisade ; their 

 huts still ranged in four-square ' islands ' like the structure- 

 lines of the old platforms ; and the bridge over the Tiber 

 which was kept by Horatius ' in the brave days of old ' was 

 still a bridge of piles, in which no iron nail might be found, to 

 be cut away in an hour on the near approach of an enemy." 

 — MjTes, The Dawn of History, pp. 228-9. 



' The authoritative book in English is Peet, The Stone and 

 Bronze Ages in Italy, which has the rare merit of an arrange- 

 ment so orderly that while the archaeological evidence is 

 adequately described and examined, the reader who is not an 

 archasological specialist is able to ascertain the conclusions and 

 the author's reasons for reaching them without getting lost 

 in a maze of specialist detail. Munro's Lake Dwellings of 

 Europe is out of date ; his latest views will be found in Palaeo- 

 lithic Man and Terramara Settlements in Europe (1012). There 

 is a brief but illuminating chapter on the Dawn of History in 

 Italy in Professor Myres's The Dawn of History (Home Univer- 

 sity Series.) 



British and Colonial Petro- 

 leum Resources 



A Review of the Present Oil 



Situation 

 By Henry B. Milner, M.A., F.G.S. 



Oil Technology Depl., Royal School ol Mines 



Nowadays, when public attention is so easily attracted 

 by any matter in the slightest degree sensational, or 

 by one which promises to provide something out of 

 the ordinary for popular diversion, it is not difficult 

 to appreciate the cause of a certain liveliness in that 

 particular section of the daily Press which exists solely 

 for the purpose of supplying its readers with articles 

 calculated to inspire the requisite feeUngs of satisfaction 

 or apprehension. No matter what the subject under 

 discussion, exaggeration and imagination are called 

 into play in the production of the most misleading 



