Golasecca Culture - Archeological Sources

Archeological Sources

The name Golasecca culture comes from the first findings that were discovered from excavations conducted from 1822, at several locations in the Comune of Golasecca, by the antiquarian abbot Father Giovanni Battista Giani (1788–1857), who identified the clearly non-Roman burials as remains of the Battle of Ticinus of 218 BCE between Hannibal and Scipio Africanus.

In 1865 Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet, a founder of European archaeology, rightly assigned the same tombs to a pre-Roman culture of the early Iron Age, with a likely Celtic substratum given the similarities with the Hallstatt Culture. He made several trips there bringing back in France part of the Abbot Giani's collection to enrich the Musée des Antiquités nationales collections, of which he was Vice-curator.

The excavations spread over various sites throughout the late 19th century. Alexandre Bertrand, also curator of the Musée des Antiquités nationales in turn went on site in 1873 and conducted some excavations by himself. With the collaboration of French, Italian and German archaeologists meeting at the Archaeological Congress of Stockholm in 1874, the timing of the Culture of Golasecca became clearer, divided into three periods from 900 to 380 BCE. It ended with the Gallic invasion of the Po Valley in 388 BCE.

The modern assessment of Golasecca culture is derived from the campaigns of 1965-69 on Monsorino, directed by A. Mira Bonomi. More recent chronological studies have been produced by Raffaele De Marinis.