Prehistoric Italy
[3] In 2011, the most ancient Sardinian complete human skeleton (called Amsicora) was discovered at Pistoccu in Marina di Arbus, dated to 8500 years ago during the transition period between the Mesolithic and Neolithic.
The main culture of the Mediterranean Neolithic, which eventually extended from the Adriatic sea to the Atlantic coasts of Portugal and south to Morocco, is also referred to as "cardial ware".
[6] Since the Late Neolithic, Aosta Valley, Piedmont, Liguria, Tuscany and Sardinia in particular were involved in the pan-Western European Megalithic phenomenon.
[7] Around the end of the third millennium BCE, Sicily imported from Sardinia typical cultural aspects of the Atlantic world, including the construction of small dolmen-shaped structures that reached all over the Mediterranean basin.
The cities of Toppo Daguzzo and La Starza were known as the center of the Proto-Apennine stage of Palma Campania culture spread in southern Italy at this time.
The Recent Bronze Age, known as the Sub-Apennine period in Central Italy, is a frame of time when sites relocated to defended locations.
[15] The settlements were usually made up of stilt houses; the economy was characterized by agricultural and pastoral activities, hunting and fishing were also practiced as well as the metallurgy of copper and bronze (axes, daggers, pins etc.).
to the second century A.D. when the island was already Romanized, evolved during the Bonnanaro period from the preexisting megalithic cultures that built dolmens, menhirs, more than 2,400 Domus de Janas and also the imponent altar of Monte d'Accoddi.
This is shown by numerous remains contained in the nuraghe, such as amber coming from the Baltic Sea, small bronze figures portraying African beasts, oxhide ingots and weapons from Eastern Mediterranean, Mycenaean ceramics.
[22] The nearby Aeolian Islands hosted the flourishing of the Capo Graziano and Milazzo cultures in the Bronze Age, and subsequently that of Ausonio (divided into two phases, I and II).
[25] The people of the Apennine culture were, at least in part, cattle herdsmen grazing their ungulates over the meadows and groves of mountainous central Italy, including on the Capitoline Hill at Rome, as shown by the presence of their pottery in the earliest layers of occupation.
The Terramare was a Middle and Recent Bronze Age culture, between the 16th and the 12th centuries B.C., in the area of what is now Pianura Padana (specially along the Panaro river, between Modena and Bologna).
[26] The influence of this population abandoning the Po valley and moving south may have formed the basis of the Tyrrhenian culture, ultimately leading to the historic Etruscans, based on a surprising level of correspondence between archeological evidence and early legends recorded by the Greeks.
The first Castellieri were indeed built along the Istrian coast and show a similar Cyclopean masonry which is also characterizing in the Mycenaean civilization at the time.The best researched Castelliere in Istria is Monkodonja near Rovinj.
They were constituted by one or more concentric series of walls, of rounded or elliptical shape in Istria and Venezia Giulia, or quadrangular in Friuli, within which was the inhabited area.
[30] Canegrate terracotta is very similar to that known from the same period north to the Alps (Provence, Savoy, Isère, Valais, the area of Rhine-Switzerland-eastern France).
It was a culture of the end of the Bronze Age (12th-10th century BC), widespread in much of the Italian peninsula and north-eastern Sicily (including the Aeolian Islands), characterized by the funeral ritual of incineration.
The name of this Iron Age civilization derives from a locality in the frazione Villanova of Castenaso, Città metropolitana di Bologna, in Emilia, where a necropolis was discovered by Giovanni Gozzadini in 1853–1856.
It succeeded the Proto-Villanovan culture during the Iron Age in the territory of Tuscany and northern Lazio and spread in parts of Romagna, Campania and Fermo in the Marche.
The main characteristic of the Villanovans (with some similarities with the Proto-Villanovan period of the late Bronze Age) were cremation burials, in which the deceased's ashes were housed in bi-conical urns and buried.
The culture was likely therefore to identify a phase of the socio-political self-consciousness of the Latin tribe, during the period of the kings of Alba Longa and the foundation of the Roman Kingdom.
It takes its name from Golasecca, a locality next to the Ticino where, in the early 19th century, abbot Giovanni Battista Giani excavated its first findings (some fifty tombs with ceramics and metal objects).
Remains of the Golasecca culture span an area of roughly 20,000 square kilometers south of the Alps and between the Po, Sesia and Serio rivers, dating from the ninth to the fourth century BCE.
Among the populations of pre-Roman Italy, the most notable were the Etruscans who, starting from the eighth century BC, created a refined civilization which largely influenced Rome and the Latin world.
