commanding five men armed with spears.^141 The importance of spears during earlier
periods of the Bronze Age of northern Italy is difficult to estimate because, as
elsewhere, the bronze spearheads of the area have not yet been catalogued.
Apparently, however, many more spearheads from the LB period have been
found than from the MB period.^142 The Val Camonica rock carvings show men
fighting with spears that clearly have metal heads, but those carvings probably
date early in the first millennium BC.^143
Chariots in northern Italy
The evidence for chariots in northern Italy comes mostly from the Terremare culture
in the central Po valley, some 150 to 200 km southwest of Treviso, and it is quite
robust. Eugen Woytowitsch, gathering together the evidence for wheeled vehicles
in Italy during the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, found and published thirty-
three Stangenknebel, all from the north.^144 A few of these, dating to the Iron Age,
were found in graves. The rest were found in Terremare settlements, which were
excavated when archaeological methods and standards still left much to be desired.
Most of these sites lie in the Emilia-Romagna region, between Bologna and
Piacenza.
Luigi Pigorini, the archaeologist most active in exploring Terremare sites, dated
the cheekpieces he found in them to the Bronze Age and even to the early centuries
of the second millennium BC. Gertrud Hermes, following Pigorini, believed that
the Italian Stangenknebel were the earliest in all of Europe. At the other extreme
Gösta Säflund, Pigorini’s hypercritic, concluded that the Stangenknebel—along with
everything else from the Terremare sites—dated almost 1000 years later. Pigorini
was closer to the mark than was Säflund, and it is now generally agreed that by 1100
BCthe Terremare villages no longer existed.^145 Although Woytowitsch did not
attempt to date the cheekpieces closely, he placed them vaguely in northern Italy’s
Middle Bronze Age.^146 Hüttel explored the matter in depth. Basing his analysis on
typological distinctions between the Stangenknebel from Iron Age graves and those
from the Terremare sites, and on the similarity of the Terremare cheekpieces to some
securely dated cheekpieces from the Carpathian basin, Hüttel concluded that the
Stangenknebel spread from the basin to northeastern Italy at the end of the Bz A2
or the beginning of the Bz B period.^147
In addition to the cheekpieces, Woytowitsch published forty-four ornaments,
made from antler, in the form of miniature spoked wheels.^148 Nineteenth-century
archaeologists found most of the ornaments in settlements, but some were found
in graves and a few can be roughly dated. Woytowitsch believed that the earliest
of the figurines were made in the Middle Bronze and the latest in the Early Iron
Age. The wheels of the ornaments tend to have either four or six spokes. Each
wheel has a pronounced or elongated nave, its center bored through for an
imaginary axle. The ornaments vary in diameter from 4 to 6 cm and the carving
was done expertly, evidently by specialist craftsmen. Woytowitsch assumed that
horse-drawn chariots were held in high regard in the communities where these
ornaments were worn.
Militarism in temperate Europe 165