Page:Palæolithic Man and Terramara Settlements in Europe.djvu/428

324 contrafforte dell' argine at Castione, the significance of these observations will be readily perceived.

In 1871 the station of Montale was selected as the most suitable to be visited by the members of the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology, who in that year met at Bologna; and for their special benefit new sections were opened up. A short account of this excursion is published in the proceedings of the C.A.P. for 1871 (p. 171), the writer of which incidentally remarks that twelve or thirteen terremare, in the vicinity of Modena, were then being exploited for their fertilising materials. Some were nearly exhausted and others were difficult of access. In selecting that of Montale the committee were guided by its typical character, the integrity of its deposits, and its proximity to the city. The true terramara layers were exposed at a depth of about 1 metre beneath the surface, and showed a stratified appearance, the strata being sometimes horizontal and sometimes inclined or wavy. The contents of the trenches yielded to the distinguished visitors a rich harvest of characteristic remains, consisting of fragments of pottery, a few bronze objects, bones of animals, charcoal and ashes, and, finally, the stumps of piles embedded in the virgin soil underneath the artificial mound.

For illustrations of the various relics found at Montale, see PI. XXXVIII. and PI. XXXIX. (Nos. 1 to 6); and for its literature, B. 54, 62, 63, 67, 75, 101 (b), 124, 130, 137, and 140 (a 2) may be consulted.

The old-school views advocated by Dr Coppi, viz., that the terremare were remains of funeral pyres (roghi), so much biassed his mind that for many years he appeared to have paid little attention to the significance of the position of the relics in the stratified deposits, and consequently the first two volumes of his magnificently illustrated monograph on the terramara of Gorzano (B. 70 and 88) lose much of their value from having objects of different ages indiscriminately mixed. This defect is so far removed in the third volume (B. 96) that he divides the deposits into upper and lower, corresponding to the historic and prehistoric periods. But,