ABSTRACT
The events that caused turmoil in the eastern Mediterranean and change in central Europe found a reflection too in the south. Most notably, settlement sites occupied more or less continuously through the earlier Bronze Age fell out of use or were abandoned, and almost simultaneously the practice of cremating the dead and placing the ashes in an urn was adopted. This 'Urnfield' rite is found, eventually, throughout Italy and over much of Jugoslavia; in Albania, on the other hand, tumulus burial continued the dominant rite. Naturally enough, the appearance of cremation burial in Italy, and with artifacts that are clearly ancestral to the Early Iron Age 'Villanovan' culture (itself arguably one ancestor of Etruscan civilization), has led to speculation that invaders arrived in Italy at the time of the great upheavals in the east, bringing with them the distinctive hallmarks of the Urnfield world in the north. Italy certainly adopted Urnfield practices, not only in burial rites but also in artifact types, symbols and techniques; so much so that from this moment on the yardstick of progress in the north, and the method by which MtillerKarpe established the chronology of the U rnfields north of the Alps, is the cross-comparison of artifact-types, principally bronzes, in Italy and in central Europe. For by Boo BC-though some traditions placed the date as early as 1000 BC-the first Greek colonists were to appear in southern Italy, bringing with them ceramics that are, by European standards, as closely datable as anything one could expect. Such finds are not, of course, present in Jugoslavia, where we must follow the course of events in terms of the central European sequence.
