The Veneti's civilisation spread from Middle Europe around 1300 BC with the Urnenfelder,(meaning urnfield carriers), as a cultural, artistic, technological - but chiefly religious - movement.
A new vision of life had arisen; its centre was Lausitz, a land between Germany and Poland. Worship of forces of nature gradually evolved towards certain forms of monotheism and generated the faith in afterlife and a profound respect of dead.
In that time, a vast area - including the regions around river Oder, mountains of Bohemia and Slovakia, the plains of Baltic countries, Ukraine and Poland - underwent a great change. Inhumation (interment of dead) was being replaced by ritual of cremation, owing to the firm belief that spirit was immortal.
Ancient historians identified these peoples by the name Veneti, referring to them as the people who conquered peacefully half of Europe, not by force but by means of their shining spiritual energy.
After the new Veneti "ideology" expanded south into the mountain chains of the Alps, it created a strong ethnic homogeneity among the peoples living in the lands of present Austria, Bavaria, Slovenia, Switzerland, Wurttemberg and even further south across the whole plain of the Po River and east as far as Hungary,
On extreme east, a Veneti settlement dating back to the oldest times was traced into Asia Minor. To the west, the ancient inhabitants of the Breton peninsula, a distant place lying on the Atlantic coast, known to Romans as Armorica, have also been identified in many literary sources, by archaeological evidences, and some elements of the local toponymy, to be of the venetic origin.
We know of the ancient Veneti's social structure that it was based on village (or town) community and that woman's position was equal to male -- unlike a typical patriarchate of other Indo-Europeans. As it is usually the case, the best records of a civilization are left to us by the remains of burials and same is true for Veneti.
Cremation was, for the ancient Veneti, more than a ceremony. It was a complex of ritual gestures to walk the dead towards the perfect bliss (the "Van"), and to support the cohesion of their society.
The corpse, laid with the finest clothes and ornaments, was wrapped up with a shroud and set down on a pyre made of holy woods and faggots. On the pyre were scattered wreaths, offers of food and of libations and sometimes pieces of incense to exhale scent during the fire. At the end, the bones were collected, chosen and cleaned one by one to be put in the ossuary together with the elements of the personal trousseau.
In the necropolis the charcoal from the burnt pyre were preserved with the ashes and the other remains in special holes.
The ceremonial required the funeral banquet, the offers of food left in the grave, probably even the performance of holy music and chants.
The case, usually made of stone, sometimes a wooden one, was used to bury a couple in a common space and was often reopened for family's other members deceased afterwards, making the familiar and social links stronger, in a sort of unity between life and death.
The primigenial religion of the ancient Veneti preserved this sense of harmony among the Universe's elements, likewise the oriental religions.
The archaeological jargon uses the Latin expression "situla" to indicate a small bucket, half-conical shaped, narrower at the bottom and supplied with a handle. Situla is usually made from bronze or other metal which allows artful hand shaping; it's almost never "fictile", i. e., moulded in clay.
Venetic situlas, however, present their own special features. First of all, the period during which this artistic form strived was the Iron Age (900 - 350 B.C.), in particular after VIII-VII century B.C. Sides of Veneti situlas are richly decorated; the art work is effected on a bronze lamina, with two kinds of techniques: the engraving ("a bulino") and in-relief ("a sbalzo"), making the shapes on the exterior jut out by tapping the interior surface with a tool, such as a little hammer. This complex technique is called toreutic.
The decorative marks are allocated in horizontal bands (in variable quantity, sometimes there is a circular one on the lid), and portray a wide variety of scenes from the life of that period, usually parades, banquets, sport competitions, feasts, or mythological scenes with stylised or fantastic animals.
Having been considered masterpieces since then, situlas are the ideal model of the Venetic art style. They emphasise face features, display suit and shape of clothes, but most of all, they convey supernatural and sacred atmosphere that flutters about them. The peculiarities are so original to settle "a trade-mark" for other objects too: helmets, sheaths, fibulas, belts, statuettes, votive laminas, etc.
In all cases, the spirit of this art identifies the religion and especially the mystical idea of the ultramundane life.