Villages of Stone

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“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 Sardinians (see the sidebar to this article). Pharaoh Ramesses II (1279–1212 B.C.) complained that the Shardana “came boldly in their warships from the midst of the sea, none being able to withstand them.”

Excavations in east-central Sardinia have shown that Sardinia was populated, although sparsely, by the latter half of the Upper Paleolithic period (c. 18,000–10,000 B.C.), when lower sea levels connected Sardinia with Corsica and only a narrow strait separated these islands from the Italian peninsula. At least eight archaeological sites in Sardinia and Corsica date to the early post-glacial or Mesolithic period (c. 10,000–6000 B.C.), though only with the spread of farming in the Neolithic period (c. 6000–3000 B.C.) did Sardinia, and many other Mediterranean islands, become widely settled.

The Neolithic period is characterized by the use of domesticated animals (sheep, goats, cattle, pigs) and plants (wheat, barley, legumes). Animal husbandry and agriculture spread from the Near East to southeastern Europe, the Danube River basin and the Mediterranean region. The Neolithic Sardinians also began making pottery, often decorated with shell impressions (a widespread practice in the western Mediterranean), and engaging in long-distance trade: Obsidian from Sardinia’s Monte Arci has been found at Neolithic sites in Corsica, Italy and France.

In this period, the Sardinians apparently developed distinctive religious and mortuary rituals. At Monte d’Accoddi in northwest Sardinia, for example, they built a 130-foot-long “altar” consisting of a ramp that leads up to a ziggurat-like platform with a red-painted shrine at its center. Unfortunately, we have no texts to tell us what went on in this shrine.

The Neolithic Sardinians buried their dead in hypogean (subterranean) rock-cut tombs known as domus de janas (house of the witches) tombs, which were modeled after domestic structures, suggesting that they believed in an afterlife. These tombs contained decorative architectural details carved in the rock, including roof beams, columns, doorways, windows, benches, niches and hearths, along with relief carvings of horns, bulls and rams. These multi-chambered tombs are very similar to contemporaneous ones on Malta. The better-known Maltese structures of Hal Saflieni and Xaghra, however, are single complexes with many large rooms, whereas the Sardinian tombs tend to be clusters of tombs, each with ten or fewer small chambers.

Our Neolithic Sardinians also carved small stone mother-goddess figurines, which they included in their burials. This perhaps reflects a common religious heritage with much of Mediterranean Europe, since fertility figurines have been found at Neolithic sites in Greece, Malta and elsewhere.

Other figurines from this period are schematic in form, with simple stylized features like those from the Cycladic islands—though Sardinian examples appear in the Late Neolithic Ozieri culture (c. 4000–3200 B.C.), centuries earlier than the Cycladic types. Some post-Neolithic Sardinian open-work figurines are extremely similar to, and contemporaneous with, Cycladic figurines—but this is probably best explained as a parallel evolution of similar prototypes, rather than as a result of cultural contact. That is, the Sardinians and Aegean islanders started from similar schematic designs and developed them in broadly similar ways.

Sardinian society of the third millennium B.C., roughly the Early Bronze Age, probably consisted of small chiefdoms. In this period, Sardinians began to build stone walls to protect their settlements, perhaps as a result of tribal rivalries. We also now find numerous individual burials—as opposed to communal burials, which would contain the bones of an extended family or a community. Some of these individual burials clearly belonged to important people, since their grave goods included copper daggers and axes, as well as carinated Bell Beaker jars (that is, clay jars with a sharp ridge on the outer surface caused by an abrupt change in the vessel’s slope) that are related to pottery from central Europe.

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The Early Bronze Age Sardinians also carved large anthropomorphic menhirs (upright standing stones) with double-dagger motifs. Similar statues have been found in other regions of western Europe, especially Corsica.

What has immortalized the Bronze Age Sardinians, however, is their creation of cyclopean stone structures known as nuraghi (singular, nuraghe). Archaeologists have found the remains of some 7,000 nuraghi, and it is estimated that there may have been as many as 25,000 to 30,000 (or about three per square mile) over the entire island. Various ideas have been proposed for how these nuraghi were used—as fortresses, grain silos, tombs, residences or territorial markers—and about how they suddenly appeared in Sardinia in the second millennium B.C.

Some argue that the nuraghe’s corbeled dome indicates that it was adapted from structures in the Aegean, particularly from the so-called Mycenaean tholos tombs (circular, corbeled-domed structures made of partially dressed stone).^a However, the earliest nuraghi were already being built between 1750 and 1500 B.C., several centuries before the Mycenaean tholos tombs were constructed. Some of the so-called corridor nuraghi, of which 180 are known, may be older than the tholos nuraghi, though the evidence is slight. Corridor nuraghi are broad, flat-topped structures constructed of dry-laid stone blocks, with interior passageways and chambers. It is commonly believed that the tholos nuraghi, with their improved masonry and more efficient spatial design, developed from the corridor nuraghi.

The classic nuraghi, most of which were built after the 16th century B.C., are truncated conical towers, typically about 40 feet in diameter (from exterior to exterior) and 50 feet high, with a flat circular roof. 046The walls consist of several courses of large, minimally dressed, dry-laid stone masonry, usually with an interior stairwell that spirals up to the roof, or to a second or even a third story. Entrance to the structure is typically through a ground-level doorway spanned by a large lintel. The ground-level chamber is usually less than 20 feet in diameter, with the vaulted ceiling rising 20 to 35 feet above the floor. Additional space, probably used for storage, was available in the one to three niches frequently left in the thick walls of the nuraghe’s main chamber.

The American archaeologist Gary Webster has estimated that a typical nuraghe, consisting of about 3,000 large stone blocks, would have required some 3,600 days of labor for a single worker. Thus a nuraghe could have been built in four to six years by ten men from neighboring farmsteads who donated two to three months of labor per year. This model, which is analogous to communal construction techniques used by the Amish in Pennsylvania, does not require a particularly hierarchical social structure. Indeed, the lack of standardization of architectural features and the use of minimally dressed local bedrock suggest that the Sardinians relied on volunteer labor to build the nuraghi.

The excavation of many nuraghi leaves no doubt that they, at least, were residences. These nuraghi contained the remains of hearths, ceramic vessels, butchered animal bones, grindstones, pestles, stone tools, spindle whorls and loom weights. Wells for drinking water are often located within several yards of these nuraghi.

Despite its massiveness, a nuraghe could not have accommodated more than a household of five or six people. Why, then, are they so large and formidable? Why would a hardworking Sardinian farming family spend so much energy and time to build a large stone house in which only a few people could live? And why would neighbors be willing to spend hundreds of hours putting up such a structure?

Possibly competition among communities for 047better agricultural land and pastures led to sometimes violent rivalries. Did the Sardinians at this time begin a more intensive exploitation of secondary animal products—including wool, milk and cheese (you can still probably find pecorino Sardo in your supermarket, though it may be labeled simply “Romano”)—because farmland was becoming scarce?

In The Prehistory of the Mediterranean (Yale, 1980), the British archaeologist David Trump describes the population of Sardinia as “scattered in small units, clans perhaps, based on homesteads rather than villages, frequently at odds with neighboring groups.” It may not be entirely coincidental that “vendetta” is the only word to make its way into English from the Sardinian or Corsican language. An especially fierce competition for arable land may have created a vendetta culture, making fortress-like nuraghi desirable as homes.

The Nuragic people typically buried their dead 049collectively in a tomba di giganti (giants’ tomb), which may have been shared by several nearby nuraghe settlements. Over 500 giants’ tombs are known; they typically consist of a narrow 60-foot-long burial chamber that leads through a huge, carved standing stone into a semi-circular forecourt of smaller (though still large) standing stones (see photo of standing stone at giant’s tomb at Arzachena). Very few skeletal remains, generally from secondary burials, have been found in the tombs. Most of the recovered ceramic, obsidian and shell artifacts have come from the forecourt, rather than from the tomb chamber, and probably were votive offerings.

Sardinian society changed significantly during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1300–900 B.C. in Sardinia and Italy)—a time when the production of metals intensified and new contacts were made with the Aegean world. Many nuraghi were enlarged with the addition of towers up to three stories, some embellished with overhanging stone parapets and terraces. The outer towers were often connected by massive walls, creating a formidable bastion that enclosed a small courtyard and a well—though dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of huts remained outside the walls, forming a small village. One large complex, Santu Antine in Torralba, had a three-story central tower (almost 70 feet high) surrounded by a two-story bastion with interior connecting galleries.

A few nuraghe complexes, including Su Nuraxi (meaning “The Nuraghe”) at Barumini,^b had multi-towered walls built in an extra layer around the bastions. These large complexes were heavily fortified domestic compounds for large elite households supported by outlying villages. They typically show abundant evidence for the production of bronze tools and weapons, as well as decorated pottery. Most of the complexes contain a large hut with wall benches and 050a carved model of a nuraghe on a raised base in its center; this structure is thought to have served as a meeting house for civic-ritual gatherings by the community’s leadership.

The complex nuraghe settlements are evidence of a more organized labor force and a more hierarchical society than existed in the earlier period, when the nuraghi were single-family homes. Nuragic chieftains probably controlled significant agricultural lands, livestock and luxury goods. It is also likely that the largest complexes reigned over a regional territory made up of nuraghe farmsteads (of the earlier type) and intermediate-sized settlements. Nevertheless, there is no evidence of centralized production or trade, which was characteristic of Mycenaean and other eastern Mediterranean societies. Most settlements of at least modest size seem to have produced their own bronze tools and objects, judging from the wide distribution of stone molds, ceramic crucibles, smithing tools and waste products. Ceramic molds used in the lost-wax method of casting ornamental objects,^c such as the famous Sardinian bronzetti (small votive figurines of humans and animals), have been found at Nuraghe Santa Barbara in Bauladu, where a small workshop has been excavated in a village that surrounded a multi-towered nuraghe complex.

In Late Bronze Age Sardinia, most cult shrines were located outside the Nuragic villages. One exception was the so-called megaron temple, a rectangular stone structure about 55 feet long with a stone slab roof. Megaron temples were built only in the larger settlements, such as Barumini and Serra Orrios, where they were kept isolated within a stone-walled temenos, or sacred precinct.

Much more common are the “sacred wells” (pozzi sacri), or water temples, which are rarely situated near Nuragic settlements. In these temples, a stone cupola covers a well shaft or spring, which is reached by a staircase from a paved forecourt. Veneration of water in Sardinia continues even today, as shown by the thousands of visitors at the modern spa at Sardara, not far from the Nuragic pozzo sacro of Sant’Anastasia. Here, recent excavations indicate that in ancient times, Sardinians made offerings at the sacred wells, sacrificing animals and presenting decorated pottery and bronze figurines to the gods.

There is abundant evidence that Nuragic Sardinians had contact with the eastern Mediterranean, as well as with Spain, Italy and Sicily. Late Helladic IIIB and IIIC (1300–1100 B.C.) pottery from Greece, Crete and Cyprus has been found in at least a dozen sites in Sardinia, most notably at Nuraghe Antigori, where 051hundreds of sherds of imported bowls and storage jars were found along with local copies of Aegean vases, kylikes (shallow drinking bowls with handles) and craters.

At 26 sites archaeologists have found copper ox-hide ingots—so-called because they resemble the stretched-out hide of an ox. From shipwrecks at Cape Gelidonya and Uluburun,^d both on the Mediterranean coast of southern Anatolia, we know that copper and tin ingots (used to make bronze) were traded around the Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age. The Sardinian ox-hide ingots generally have Cypro-Minoan markings, suggesting that they were imported from Cyprus or the Aegean. Although the origin of the copper ore used to make the ingots is still a matter of debate, lead-isotope analyses by Noël and Zofia Gale of Oxford University have shown that the copper ox-hide ingots match Cypriot ore whereas Sardinian copper bun ingots and bronze artifacts match local Sardinian ore.^e Transporting Cypriot copper to an island rich in copper resources was not like bringing coal to Newcastle; once the metal was mined and purified, it would have had significantly enhanced value, even for a people with access to raw copper ore.

Although few identifiable Late Bronze Age Sardinian pottery sherds have been found outside of Sardinia, some have turned up on the island of Lipari, off the north coast of Sicily, and on Crete. It appears that the Sardinians did not export their pottery for its own sake—which makes them like other peoples around the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. But this does not mean that the Sardinians had few or no commercial contacts with their Mediterranean neighbors. Rather than trading the ceramic vessels themselves, the Sardinians probably traded the commodities contained within the vessels, such as scrap metal.

Another possible “export” may have been Sardinians themselves. Mercenary warriors identified as “Shardana” (probably Sardinians) are mentioned in the Amarna letters—a group of clay tablets found at Tell el-Amarna, Egypt, forming the diplomatic correspondence of the Egyptian pharaohs Amenophis III (1390–1352 B.C.) and his son Akhenaten (1332–1336 B.C.) with other Near Eastern potentates. In the Amarna letters, Shardana warriors 054are said to be stationed in Egyptian garrisons in the Levant, for example at Beth-Shean and Lachish, both in modern Israel. A century later, Pharaoh Ramesses II observed that Shardana pirates were pillaging sites along Egypt’s coast. The Shardana are also cited several times in reliefs at Karnak and Medinet Habu as one of the Sea Peoples who raided Egypt during the 055reigns of Merneptah (1213–1203 B.C.) and Ramesses III (1184–1153 B.C.).

In 13th-century B.C. Ugarit, modern Ras Shamra on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, Shardana are included in administrative lists of persons mobilized for military service at the royal palace. According to a document from Ugarit, a Shardana man named Allan had fields in Ugarit that he received from the king, probably as a grant for military service.

The 11th-century B.C. Onomasticon of Amenope (an Egyptian priest who sailed up the Levantine coast) lists the Shardana as one of the peoples of Canaan, perhaps living in the region of present-day northern Israel and southern Lebanon. Indeed, in the May/June 2002 issue of Archaeology Odyssey’s sister magazine Biblical Archaeology Review, Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal argues that certain structures he has excavated in the region of Mt. Carmel, in Israel, are directly related to the Sardinian nuraghi—which, if corroborated, would strengthen the argument that “Shardana” is etymologically related to “Sardinia.”

The connection between Sardinia and Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age was particularly strong, as shown by the archaeological record. Especially after the collapse of Mycenaean and other centers around 1200 B.C.,^f the Sardinians both imported bronze tripod-stands from Cyprus and made local imitations. Also, the similarity of Sardinian double-axes to Cypriot examples, as well as the similarity in such metalworking tools as fire tongs, hammers and shovels, suggests that there was frequent contact between the two islands. Even more striking is the resemblance between a famous bronze “god” from Enkomi, Cyprus, and some Sardinian warrior bronzetti.

But it was the Phoenicians—particularly those from Tyre, in modern Lebanon—who established actual colonies in Sardinia by the first half of the eighth century B.C. The Phoenicians also carried Sardinian pottery to Carthage and to Khaniale Tekke, Crete—where a Sardinian askos (a piriform, or “pear-shaped,” jug with a strap-handle) was found in the family tomb of a goldsmith who was probably from north Syria.

A fragmentary, early eighth-century B.C. Phoenician inscription found at Nora in Sardinia establishes that the name of the island was “Sardinia,”

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at least for the Phoenicians, even in ancient times. The Nora Stone apparently commemorates the building of a temple to (or by) lpmy on the island of srdn (Sardinia). Scholars translate lpmy as Pygmalion, probably referring either to the Phoenician king Pygmalion of Tyre (c. 831–785 B.C.) or to a Cypriot god of the same name and of Tyrian origins.^g

By the mid-seventh century B.C. Phoenician colonies existed all along the southern and western coasts of Sardinia, and Phoenician material has been found at many sites throughout the island. By the mid-sixth century B.C. Carthage had begun an active imperialist expansion in the western Mediterranean, in competition with the Greeks. A 059treaty between Carthage and Rome, signed about 509 B.C., gave Carthage control over all trade with Sardinia, and by about 450 B.C. Carthage controlled much of the island’s arable land.

Even within Carthaginian-dominated territory, however, indigenous Sardinians continued to live at nuraghe sites, and there is no evidence of significant abandonment or flight to mountain refuges. Indeed, combined Carthaginian and Sardinian forces resisted the Romans during the Punic Wars. Although Sardinia became a Roman province in 227 B.C., aspects of both Nuragic Sardinian and Punic culture persisted into the medieval period. Even today, the pagan elements present in Christian holidays and rites attest to the strength of the Nuragic spirit.

In the last 80 years, then, archaeology has given the lie to D.H. Lawrence’s description of Sardinia as having “no history, no date, no race, no offering.” For Lawrence, that lack of history was a blessing: It made the Sardinians pure, free, mysterious. Science, however, makes them interesting.

“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 […]