Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/38

28 been the Scythians, although the matter is incapable of proof. Pressure from this direction set both culture and population in motion toward the west, in much the same way that the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century induced the Renaissance in Italy.

IV. ''The remarkable prehistoric civilization of Italy is due to the union of two cultures: one from the Hallstatt region having entered Europe by way of the Danube, the other coming from the southeast by sea being distinctly Mediterranean. From these evolved the Umbrian and the Etruscan civilizations, followed in the historic period by the early Latin.''

The earliest culture in Italy worthy the name is found in the palafitte or pile dwellings, in the northern lakes, and in the so-called terramare settlements in the valley of the Po. The former are not distinguishable from similar structures in the Swiss lake dwellings, but the terramare are entirely peculiar to Italy. Their like is not found anywhere else in Europe. Briefly described, they are villages built upon raised platforms of earth, encircled by a moat, and generally having a ditch or small pond in the middle, in which an altar is erected. These complicated structures are built upon the low, marshy, alluvial plains along the Po, but show many points of similarity with the true pile dwellings. The people of this early period were in the pure stone age, with few arts save that of making the coarser kinds of pottery. From their osseous remains, they seem to have been of a long-headed type, quite like their predecessors, who were cave dwellers. After a time, without any modification of the modes of construction of their settlements, new elements appear among these terramare people, bringing bronze and introducing cremation. At about the same period, as we have said, the Alpine broad-headed race began its submergence of the primitive Ligurian type, leading to the formation of the north Italian population as we see it to-day. This type surely invaded Italy from the north and northeast.

From the foregoing considerations it will appear that there were two constituent streams of culture and also of men here uniting in the valley of the Po and on the northern slopes of the Apennines. Possibly, as Chantre affirms, these two streams were from a common Oriental source, here being reunited after long and independent migrations. At all events, a remarkable advance in culture speedily ensued, superior to either of those from which its elements were derived. For the civilization unearthed at Villanova, in the Certosa at Bologna. at Este, and elsewhere, while in much of its bronze work similar to the Hallstatt types, contained a number of added features, obviously either indigenous or brought directly from the south. The Hallstatt affinities are especially revealed in the situlæ to which we have already called attention. That of Arnoaldi, discovered at