In fact the Bronze Age in Italy of which the terremare are a part represents a considerable cultural development beyond the level of the Neolithic Tavoliere folk. Cave dwellings from Liguria show a people using wagons and ox-drawn plows. Chemical analysis of their copper shows that some of it comes from central Germany, though a copper ingot from Sardinia betrays by its impressed double-ax trade-mark some connection with Minoan Crete. (The terremare are contemporary with Mycenae.) Bronze Age women wore jewelry: jadeite arm rings, necklaces of pierced red coral, bored stones, or clamshells. Curious stamps called pintaderas were used to impress a pattern in color on the body. A horned mannikin, with penis erect, from Campo di Servirola, now in the museum of Reggio Emilia, may be evidence for fertility cult, like the neolithic female idols from the Ligurian caves.
The Po valley in the Bronze Age was a melting pot in which a variety of cultures, indigenous and immigrant, mingled. What is to be read from the excavations is almost a recapitulation in this early period, in terms of creative imitation of imported and native forms and ideas, of the whole cultural history of Rome. To our knowledge of this culture, and to our appreciation of the importance of scrupulous archaeological recording, the curious story of Pigorini’s terremare contributed not a little.
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The island of Sardinia to the archaeologist is a fascinating curiosity, isolated, until recently, by its unhealthy climate and its odd dialect. In prehistoric times, however, while Sardinia’s development does not parallel that of the mainland, its level of culture appears from archaeological finds and monuments to have been higher, not lower, than that of Italy proper. This superior level seems to have been due to Sardinia’s richness in metals. To protect the wealth, the prehistoric islanders built enormous watchtowers, called nuraghi, which developed into veritable feudal castles with villages nestling at their feet.
Recent excavations (1951–56) by Professor Giovanni Lilliu of the University of Cagliari have cast clearer light on Sardinia’s culture. He excavated the huge nuraghe of Su Nuraxi, at Barumini, some thirty miles north of Cagliari. When he began, Su Nuraxi was a small hill covered with ruins, earth, and scrub. Now six campaigns have revealed a truncated conical tower ([Fig. 1.7]), built, without mortar, of huge many-sided blocks of basalt. Clustered above the tower he found a small Village; the whole complex—tower plus the village—is surrounded by other nuraghi on neighboring hills. To the original single tower four others, with upper courses of dressed stone, were added in a clover-leaf pattern, linked by a curtain-wall enclosing a court sixty feet deep, with a reservoir fifteen feet deep for drinking water. The central tower is three stories high, with a corbelled or false-vaulted roof built of gradually converging horizontal courses. The upper stories were reached by a spiral stair in the thickness of the wall. Lilliu meticulously observed stratigraphy; for dating, he submitted samples of carbonized matter from the towers to laboratories in Milan, and was told that the Carbon 14 process dates his remains as 1270 B.C. ± 200 years.
The C14 method of dating, an American device discovered and perfected by Professor W. F. Libby and his associates at the University of Chicago Institute of Nuclear Studies, is sufficiently new to deserve a word of explanation here. All living matter has a uniform radioactivity associated with its carbon content. The supply of the radioactive isotope C14 ceases when living matter, wood, foliage, etc., dies. Scientists can calculate the time elapsed since death by counting the residual radioactivity of C14 in the organic specimen, since the rate of decay can be described by specifying how long it takes for half the number of atoms in a given sample to disintegrate. For C14 this period, called its “half-life,” is 5700 years. If the present assay of a specimen of organic matter, for instance, is 12.5 C14 explosions per minute per gram of carbon, an ancient organic sample assaying at 6.25 would be 5700 years old (the half-life of C14). Checking with samples of known date has proved the method accurate within 200 years either way. For most classical objects found in association with organic matter this is valueless, since a trained archaeologist can date a pot, an inscription, or an architectural block by eye within fifty years or less. But the method is invaluable for making more precise the great sweeps of time in prehistory. Thus the lowest C14 date for Su Nuraxi, 1070 B.C., would take it almost into the Iron Age in Italy; at this date culture on the mainland was much more primitive.
Lilliu calls the period of the four added towers Lower Nuragic I, and dates it 800–750 B.C. These smaller towers contain each a single cell with two rows of loopholes. They are guard-posts, and are equipped with speaking-tubes for the guards use when challenging.
In the next period, Upper Nuragic I, dated by Lilliu 750–500 B.C., the earth having subsided, the four towers and the walls were reinforced. The ground-level entrance was blocked, and replaced by a new entrance twenty-one feet higher, accessible only by ladder. Battlements now replaced the loopholes. Stone balls found in the excavations were apparently the projectiles hurled from these battlements. From a watchtower added to the central nuraghe come conch shells, perhaps intended to be sounded like trumpets.
The surrounding village, of 200 or 300 huts, separated by narrow labyrinthine passages, housed the troops; the chief lived in the tower. The village, hard-hit when the Carthaginians sacked it late in the sixth century B.C., survived in decadence till the late first century B.C. The typical oval or rectangular plan of an early Su Nuraxi village hut resembles that of the Bronze Age in Sicily or Cyprus. One contained a pit for votive offerings. Sixty round huts, with lower courses in stone, have been dated in Upper Nuragic I. They would have been roofed, like shepherd huts in Sardinia to this day, with logs and branches weighted by stones. One larger circle has seats around its inner perimeter. It was equipped with shelves, a niche, a stone basin, and a sacred stone (a model of a nuraghe). Lilliu thinks this must have been the warriors’ council chamber.
Su Nuraxi yielded artifacts in stone, terracotta, bronze, iron, lead, and amber, the latter showing connections with trade routes to the Baltic. Lilliu found axes, millstones, pestles, and bronze votive statuettes. Pottery and fibulae (humble safety-pins, whose shapes, varying from age to age, are a help in dating) suggest connections with Phoenicia—via Carthage—and Etruria, whose rich and, in certain respects, mysterious culture is discussed in the next chapter.