• In the following outline, necessarily con densed, an attempt will be made to give a more detailed idea of Italian archaeology in the present stage of the study.
I. Stone Age. A. Archsolithic.— Besides the localities mentioned in an article by Mor tille (Revue mens. de l'ecole d'anthrop. de Paris, 1891) on the diffusion in Italy of axe beads of the type of Chelles, it appears that these objects have been found in other places also. Still more recently they have been seen on the island of Capri (Bull. di paletn., ib. 1906), where, as in the black earth (Terra nera) of Venosa, they are found with bones of animals of an extinct species and precede the great con flagrations caused by the volcanoes of the re gion. On the spread of the so-called Monster and Campigny types (see Colini, ib., p. 203 et seq.) these stone implements had a large dif fusion in Italy.
It is now certain that in the Quaternian Age dead bodies were placed in the caves of the Bolsi Rossi (which although situated in Italy belong to the French sphere of influence), with rites which were still in use among the neolithites of western Liguria. (Consult Issel, in Bull. di paletnol. ib., 1906, p. 102).
B. Neolithic Period.— This age is character ized by stones which are polished and bored (hammers, axe-heads, studied principally by Colini) or finely retouched. Polished Italian axes are not usually of silicon material, but the most ancient are of green rocks, later of vari ous rocks. Green rock was for a time held to be exotic and a proof of the immigration of the neolithic people, but total strata of it are be ginning to be found and in any case such proofs of immigration do not holdgood, be cause it is much more easy for the object itself to have traveled from tribe to tribe as among modern savages. Besides, this epoch has a beautiful and solid pottery made by hand and burned over an open flame as continued to be the case during the prehistoric age down to the introduction of the pottery oven and of the wheel which came with the Hellenic and Etruscan influence. But the neolithic Italian pottery is not only more beautiful and more solid in foim, it is also more rich in ornamen tation, which phenomenon is found also out side of Italy. A class of this pottery, indubi tably neolithic, although the descendants of its authors afterward possessed bronze, is better repreSented in southern Italy, especially in the grotto of Pertosa, near Salerno. The neolithic
period of Sicily, on the other hand, admirably represented by the deposit at Steatinelio near Syracuse, is connected in form and ornamen tation rather with occidental development and with the pottery of the dolmens, as Pigorini has • already shown in connection with the famous bell cup of Villafrati. Megalithic mon uments, are especially known in southern Italy and in• the Italian islands.
The Italian neolithites lived in four ways: In grottoes; in fragile huts, the traces of which have been lost; in • semi-subterranean huts (in which the part beneath the earth is found filled with human deposits, the so-called "hut re mains”, and on pile structures. The argu ments formerly advanced for distinguishing different peoples by the varying style of their dwelling-places no longer hold good, in view of the facts; at times, however, a difference of age may be so distinguished. The dead were buried in caverns or • in open ditches, mostly in a doubled-up position, sometimes on a bed of ochre from which the bones became colored. and which led to the belief in the practise of .scarifying; this is no longer admitted to-day.
II. Metal Age. C. iEiseolithic.— The pop ulation which occupied Italy and the islands during the Neolithic Age still remained when it began to possess and to cast objects of copper and then of bronze, or rather of an imperfect alloy as are the oldest ones. The rites and cus toms remained in substance the same, only be coming more developed. This has been amply demonstrated in the profoundly scholarly mon ograph of Colin', (II Sepolcreto di Remedello e it periodo eneolitico in Italia.> It is note worthy that in that epoch there were already sporadic cases of cremation, which shows how even primitive indigenous customs evolve and change without the intervention of new people. The singular position assumed by Sicily in this epoch is also worthy of note, with its typical small funeral grottoes cut in the rock and its bichromic pottery painted with linear orna ments of savage taste.