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Although the pile-dwellings of Switzerland and of the TERREMARES of Italy would appear to have been in themselves protection enough, their inhabitants did not neglect other means of defence, from which we may gather that they were engaged in constant and terrible struggles.
In some places three such platforms have been found one above another. As in the Lake Stations, excavations of the TERREMARES have brought to light numerous bones of domestic animals; but those of wild creatures, such as bears, stags, roedeer, and boars, are even rarer than in Switzerland.
The inhabitants evidently had other resources than hunting at their command, and though the processes they employed were but elementary, they cultivated corn, beans, vines, and various fruits. Though iron was still unknown, some bronze objects have been found in certain TERREMARES, but these were only roughly melted pieces of metal, showing no traces of having been either hammered or soldered.
In some cases a number of TERREMARES, close to one another, form regular villages covering an area of from five to six miles square.
At Castione, near the town of Parma, and in several other parts of the provinces of Parma and Reggio, TERREMARES have been discovered rising from the midst of vast rectangular basins artificially hollowed out.
Some have concluded from this that the TERREMARECOLLI as the inhabitants of the TERREMARES have been called, were descended from the people who built the pile dwellings of Switzerland, and that, faithful to the traditions of their race, they hollowed out ponds in default of natural lakes. If this were so, Italy must have been peopled with a race that came over the Alps.
But the objects collected in some of the TERREMARES, those of Varano and Chierici for instance, prove that they were inhabited from Neolithic times, so that the Itali of Italy, if Itali they were, did but follow the traditions of their predecessors.
It cannot, however, have been the Ligures, a branch of the great Iberian family, who were totally ignorant of culture, and to whom the builders of the most ancient of the TERREMARES were certainly superior; nor can it have been the Etruscans, for all relics of that race, which are moreover easily recognizable, were found quite apart from the deep deposits containing the TERREMARES. Many indications point to the conclusion that when the Celts came down into Italy their knowledge of metallurgy was already more advanced than that of the builders of the TERREMARES. We are therefore disposed to think with Heilbig, that the TERREMARECOLLI were the Itali, of Arian race, who were the ancestors of the Sabini, Umbri, Osci, and Latins.
Caves, Kitchen-Middings, Lake Stations, "Terremares," Crannoges, Burghs, "Nurhags," "Talayoti," and "Truddhi." The earliest races of men lived in a climate less rigorous than ours, on the shores of wide rivers, in the midst of fertile districts, where fishing and the chase easily supplied all their needs.
The TERREMARES were generally surrounded by a talus or rampart of earth, with an external fosse which protected the approaches to the dwellings. In Switzerland, some works recently undertaken to deflect the course of the Aar, on its exit from Lake Bienne, have led to the discovery of a village of the Stone age, with the bridges leading to it and the little forts intended to protect it.
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