New to this sub, so I'm not sure how to phrase the question...
I'm an amateur bowyer, so I like to recreate bows and arrows from the past. The problem is my lack of knowledge of European cultures. I'd like to start building a series of bows from my own ethnic past, using the correct woods and designs, and maybe understand how they evolved.
Anyway, the family from my father's side comes from rural northern Italy, my mother's is Germany but it would be hard to trace back with the mix-matched Germanic tribes. Where would a northern Italian have come from historically? Mostly interested in Bronze and Neolithic civilizations as anything later in Europe is generally just the simple "English style" longbow.
Sorry if this question is vague or hard to answer definitively.
There were many archeological cultures in Northern Italy, but we have no clue about their ethnic origins. The first known culture in the Po Valley were the Celts, which is why the Romans called the area Cisalpine Gaul as opposed to Transalpine Gaul, also inhabited by Celts.
There were also the Etruscans in what is today Tuscany who were conuered by Romans very early on. And then there were Italic Indo-European tribes, including Latins. Depends on how you define northern Italy - here is a map.
I'm really not sure it'll be that much easier to say where Northern Italians come from than Germans. You had very early settlement like the Nuraghe builders, Etruscans, Latins, etc, as well as settlement by Greeks (chiefly in the south), no doubt numerous modern Italians descended from slaves brought by the Roman empire to Italy from Gaul, Egypt, and who knows where else, Gothic and Lombard invasions, Arab and Berber-based emirate of Sicily, Venetians bringing in Albanian mercenaries and Circassian sex slaves.
Overall, though, the bulk of genetic evidence suggests that most Italians are descended from people who have been in Italy a long time. It's not like, say, Turkey or the United States, where the population that is there today is predominantly not descended from the population that was there 3,000 years ago.
Bows? You might want to check out /r/bowyer or /r/archery. You might look into the bow of Otzi the Iceman, who seems to have had some sort of yew longbow.
