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Volume 105 No. 2
April 2001
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Constructing a Nuragic Locale: The Spatial Relationship between Tombs and Towers in Bronze Age Sardinia
Emma Blake
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| Nuraghe Is Paras (Isili). (Photo E. Blake) |
Sardinia's monumental tombs and settlement towers (nuraghi) are the most distinctive remnants of the island's Nuragic culture, spanning the early second millennium B.C. into the first millennium B.C. Studies of this period inevitably begin and end with the architecture, and these monuments serve as the primary evidence for reconstructing social and political organization, subsistence strategies, religion, and technology. Yet in each case the monuments are studied as isolated objects: there has been no systematic study of the links between these settlement and mortuary structures. This article examines the spatial arrangement of the megalithic tombs in relation to settlements on Sardinia. Purposefully constructed and meaningfully constituted, the spaces or "locales" created by the patterned placement of the tombs are indeed artifacts, and may be analyzed as such. The unusual patterning suggests that these spaces were not by-products of unstudied collective behavior, but were tactically designed to convey ideological messages of ongoing significance in Nuragic society.
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