3000 to 4000 BCE? Lots of complete sets of remains. Still Neolithic, I guess- at least in Italy.
The Villanovan culture was the earliest Iron Age culture of central and northern Italy, abruptly following the Bronze Age Terramare culture and giving way in the 7th century BCE to an increasingly Orientalizing culture influenced by Greek traders, which was followed without a severe break by the Etruscan civilization. Villanovan cultural origins, but perhaps not all its peoples, lay in the Eastern Alps, with connections to the Halstatt culture. The Villanovans introduced iron-working to the Italian peninsula; they practiced cremation and buried the ashes of their dead in pottery urns of distinctive double-cone shape.

The culture is broadly divided into a proto-Villanovan culture (Villanovan I) from 1100 BC to 900 BC and the Villanovan culture proper (Villanovan II) from 900 BC to 700 BC, when the Etruscan cities began to be founded.


Terramare or Terramara is a Bronze Age archaeological culture of Italy and Dalmatia, dating to ca. 1500-1100 BC. It takes its name from the "black earth" (terremare) residue of settlement mounds.

This civilization is represented by a number of finds, once thought to be sepulchral, but really the remains of human habitations, analogous to shell heaps or kitchen middens, the "black earth" used by later farmers as fertilizer. They are found chiefly in north Italy, in the valley of the Po, in the vicinity of Modena, Mantua and Parma. A summary of early results as to these mounds was published by Munro (Lake Dwellings) in 1890, but scientific investigation really began only with the excavation of the terramare at Fontanellato (province of Parma) in 1889. From this and succeeding investigations certain general conclusions have been reached.


The Bronze Age was a period in the civilization's development when the most advanced metalworking (at least in systematic and widespread use) consisted of techniques for smelting copper and tin from naturally occurring outcroppings of ore, and then alloying those metals in order to cast bronze. The Bronze Age forms part of the three-age system for prehistoric societies. In that system, it follows the Neolithic in some areas of the world. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Neolithic is directly followed by the Iron Age.