Image Details

Robert H. Tykot

Towering 50 feet in the air and consisting of about 3,000 large stones, the nuraghe of Succornis (shown here, compare with photo of corbeled dome at Su Nuraxi in Barumini) probably housed a single family. Classic nuraghi were built with a corbeling technique, in which each course of stones juts slightly to the center of the structure to form a partial dome, which is then capped with a flat stone. These corbeled domes first appeared in Sardinia around the 16th century B.C., hundreds of years before the Mycenaeans began building similarly domed tholos tombs.