Europe’s Forgotten People: The Nuragic Civilization of Sardinia

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Europe’s Forgotten People: The Nuragic Civilization of Sardinia 0:00 Sardinia’s Megalithic and Bronze Age Tombs 1:37 Who were the Nuragic people? 4:30 Historical Outline 6:45 The Sea People? 8:45 Outside Influences 10:46 Statues 12:20 Su Nuraxi 13:45 The Giants’ Graves 16:38 Conquest 19:17 Legacy The Nuragic civilization evolved from the culture of the Neolithic people who settled on the island of Sardinia as far back as the fourth millennium BCE. They were engaging in extensive agriculture, livestock herding and mining here. Trade developed and the people of the island acquired a degree of prosperity owing to the fact that Sardinia was one of the first places in the Mediterranean world that we know of where silver mining was occurring. With prosperity came a richer stratified society and this in turn created a society in which elites wished to be buried in substantial tombs that marked out their distinct position within their society. Hence, by the third millennium BCE we start to find all manner of megalithic tombs being built around Sardinia. __________________________________________________ Sources: Miriam S. Balmuth, Nuragic Sardinia and the Mycenanean World (Oxford, 1987). Stephen L. Dyson and Robert J. Rowland, Shepherds, Sailors and Conquerors: The Archaeology and History of Sardinia from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages (Pittsburgh, 2007). R. Ross Holloway, ‘Nuragic Tower Models and Ancestral Memory’, in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, Vol. 46 (2001), pp. 1–9. Carlo Maxia and Giovanni Floris, ‘Astroarchaeology and Nuragic Megalithism’, in Anthropologie, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1976), pp. 217–219. C. Gary S. Wesbster, A Prehistory of Sardinia, 2300 – 500 BC (Sheffield, 1996). Mauro Peppino Zedda, ‘Orientation of the Sardinian Nuragic “meeting huts”’, in Mediterranean Archaeology & Archaeometry, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2016), pp. 195–201.