Cristiano Putzolu

La valle del Taro nell'eta del Bronzo Cristiano Putzolu

This book focuses on the Bronze Age population of an area that corresponds to the modern administrative Province of Parma, Italy. In the plain near the River Taro, during the second half of the XIX century, Pigorini (the godfather of Italian palethnology) found the first sites of the so-called Terramare Culture. Since his pioneering work, many sites have been discovered and good regional studies have been published. This book starts from this heritage and applies a landscape archaeology approach. Due to the position of the study area, at the western side of the Terramare Culture region, it has focused heavily on exogenous material culture. For a better definition of the dynamics of the population both on the plain and in the mountains, different methodological approaches have been followed: spatial analyses of the plain sites and viewshed analyses of the mountain sites. Another area of focus is the borderland dynamics between the Terramare Culture and the so-called "western facies of the Italian Bronze Age", which runs in the mountains of the study area, and a rather original interpretation of events has been proposed. Finally, a comprehensive framework for the population dynamics in this key area is given.