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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > March/April 2003

Villages of Stone

Sardinia’s Bronze Age Nuraghi

By Robert H. Tykot

“It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation.” That’s how D.H. Lawrence described Sardinia in Sea and Sardinia (1923), and until recently that’s what many thought about this island: During the third and second millennia B.C., Sardinia remained isolated from the vibrant cultures of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. Decades of archaeological research, however, paint a different picture. Not only did the Bronze Age Sardinians 044maintain contact with the Minoans and Mycenaeans, but they may also have migrated to the Near East. Many scholars identify a people called the Shardana, mentioned in a number of Egyptian texts, as […]

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Footnotes

1.

In constructing a corbeled wall, each course of stones juts out slightly toward the center of the structure, eventually forming a partial interior dome.

2.

Su Nuraxi was excavated in the 1940s and 1950s by the so-called father of Sardinian archaeology, Giovanni Lilliu.

3.

In the lost-wax method, a model of the object to be cast is made in wax and then covered with clay. When baked, the wax runs out, leaving a clay mold for molten metal.

4.

See Cemal Pulak, “Shipwreck! Recovering 3,000-Year-Old Cargo,” AO 02:04.

5.

Scholars do not know for certain the source of the tin used in Sardinia and the eastern Mediterranean. Although tin deposits in Sardinia have been exploited in modern times, we have no evidence that they were used in antiquity. One possible source is Iberia, from which the Sardinians imported some metal objects.

6.

See William H. Stiebing, Jr., “When Civilization Collapsed: Death of the Bronze Age,” AO 04:05.

7.

The Sardinians developed no writing of their own. In Greek texts, Sardinia is referred to as Ichnusa (footprint or stepping-stone), possibly a reference to the island’s role as a stopover for ships sailing east and west in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Mediterranean.