Page:Curious myths of the Middle Ages (1876).djvu/381

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ends were elaborately engraved with crosses (Figs. 23. 25. 27). In the ossuaries made of double cones, around the diaphragm ran a line of circles containing crosses (Fig. 26).

Another cemetery ol the same people exists at Golasecca, on the plateau of Somma, at the extremity of the Lago Maggiore. A vast number of sepulchres have there been opened. They belong to the same period as those of Villanova, the age of lacustrine habitations.

“That which characterizes the sepulchres of Golasecca, and gives them their highest interest,” says M. de Mortillet, who investigated them, “is this,—first, the entire absence of all organic representations; we only found three, and they were exceptional, in tombs not belonging to the plateau;— secondly, the almost invariable presence of the cross under the vases in the tombs. When one reverses the ossuaries, the saucer-lids, or the accessory vases, one saw almost always, if in good preservation, a cross traced thereon. … The examination of the tombs of Golasecca proves in a most convincing, positive, and precise manner, that which the terramares of Emilia had only indicated, but which had been confirmed by the cemetery of Villanova; that above a thousand years before