The nuraghi emerged in their typical conical form circa 1700 bc, signifying the first unified, islandwide culture on Sardinia in a thousand years. The towers average 12 m in external diameter and 15 to 20 m in height when complete. Inside a vaulted ceiling covers a circular chamber. Although the plan is quite homogeneous, types of stone and construction technique vary. It is presumed therefore that the nuraghi were not built under the aegis of a regional-level authority. This has important implications for understanding these spatial arrangements, because the nuraghi and their placement may be seen as products of local decision-making. While they are dispersed, the nuraghi are not isolated, sometimes just half a kilometer apart. Help from neighbors would clearly have been necessary to construct these towers. Their impressive size and stern exterior have led many to label them fortresses, though given their number and density, that would imply an extremely bellicose society indeed. The absence of weapons in graves or evidence of violent deaths further weakens this theory. It is possible that a condition of endemic feuding between families prevailed akin to Iron Age Scotland, which produced similar fortified towers.

Giants’ Tomb S’ena e Thome

The giants’ tombs were communal tombs similar to the passage graves or allées couvertesfound throughout northern Europe. Their name derives from local legends that identified these structures as graves of an extinct race of giants. The giants’ tombs consist of a rectangular chamber approximately 8 m long and 1 m wide inside, fronted by a semicircular forecourt. Remains from the forecourt suggest that gatherings, possibly feasting, occurred there. While the basic tomb form was maintained for nearly a thousand years, construction techniques changed through time, from slabs to coursed blocks to ashlar masonry by the end of the second millennium bc.

Giants’ Tomb Coddu Vecchiu

set out to record the spatial arrangements of these monuments for my doctoral research at Cambridge University. In the summers of 1996, 1997, and 1998, I compiled a corpus of all the known giants’ tombs and features of their placement in relation to nuraghi, using both published data and my own monument surveys. The variables I recorded: distance between monuments, intervisibility, altitude differential, orientation, and alignment, yielded interesting patterns. The overwhelming majority of the tombs are no more than 500 m away from a nuraghe, but only a handful are less than 100 m away. The tombs and towers are visible from each other 91 percent of the time. The majority (86 percent) of the tomb entrances are oriented between east and south. In addition, most (68 percent) of the tombs are aligned on the same axis as the nearest tower. The majority (62 percent) of the tombs are found at a lower altitude than the nearest nuraghe. While all these factors show strong patterning, distance, orientation, and intervisibility were of foremost importance, while the other factors were apparently obtained when possible. The combination of all these variables can only have been achieved by careful planning, taking into account the local topography, which ranges from flat plains to rolling hills to mountainous terrains. These arranged monuments formed locales that would have been immediately recognizable to others on the island, themselves occupying similar places. This sort of purposeful planning at the local level suggests efforts at maintaining an integrated community in the absence of everyday face-to-face interaction. The locales would have had a unifying effect, providing, if not the shared experience of a central communal place, a familiar experience that both reflected cultural and social cohesion and reinforced it.

Nuraghe Duos Nuraghes

The nuraghi and their culture continued for a very long time: many of the nuraghi show signs of continuous occupation for a thousand years, and the pottery, lithics, and subsistence practices show only minor variation over time. The endurance of the Nuragic culture is particularly notable given that Sardinia was far from isolated but instead engaged in trade and interaction from the Neolithic on, for the island was a source of both obsidian and copper. The culture was not static: the social structure changed over time, evident in the changing settlement patterns. The simple single tower nuraghi of the Early and Middle Bronze Ages were joined by multitowered structures in the Late Bronze Age, ca. 1200 to 900 bc. Nucleated settlements emerged, both in the form of agglomerations of huts around nuraghi, and independently of them. These new monumental complexes and nucleated settlements point to a more complex stratified society. My research showed that the spatial arrangements of the towers and tombs changed over time, corresponding to these social changes. In all of the variables save orientation, there is increasing conformity. The distance between the tombs and towers shrinks by a hundred meters, and the later monumental pairs demonstrate higher proportions of each variable. I would argue that as the society became more segmented, it was vitally important to reinforce a common cultural identity, and this was done in part through these carefully structured spaces. However one chooses to interpret this correlation between social changes and spatial changes, it is clear that the spaces of past peoples are artifacts that merit closer study. I am further exploring this topic of space as a mechanism in community building in a book I’m writing on The Archaeology of Space and Community.