A Terramare Site on the Po Plain in Italy

Abstract

The “Terramare” are banked and moated villages dating to the Middle and Recent Bronze ages (1600–1150 year BCE), located in the alluvial plain of the Po river, northern Italy. They are witness to a complex society, whose subsistence was based on intensive agriculture, pastoralism, and long-range trade (Barfield 1994). The Terramare people first carried out a radical clearing of the Po plain to provide land for intensive agriculture, and changed the natural drainage by digging canals and ditches to feed moats surrounding the villages and to irrigate the fields in the countryside (Cremaschi et al. 2006). The culture reached its apogee, along with a prolific population, at the beginning of the Recent Bronze age, but at the end of this period suffered a societal collapse that led to the abandonment of the villages in a few generations (Cardarelli 2010).