Complessi fortificati della Sardegna e delle isole del Mediterraneo Occidentale nella Protostoria

Nuraghi are powerfully walled structures: traditional interpretations point at their supposed basic military function; recent views remark their polisemic and changing function involving social and ritual aspects. Nuragic walls include 3 different concentric structures: nuraghe itself (archaic pre-tholos, single-tower tholos and multi-towered tholos buildings); antemurals, typical of some multi-towered nuraghi; circuit walls, enclosing villages. The origin of the nuraghi is traced back to the Middle Bronze Age; their connections with western Mediterranean insular megalithic non-funerary buildings are evident, but developments are strictly local. The evolution of nuragic landscapes shows a complexity which can’t be reduced to simple geographic models of power, but the record is blurred by territorial palimpsests, and because of the limited number of complete excavations. The interpretation of the balance between hierarchic and contested power systems is part of the current debate. The exhaustion of the building tradition is set to the Late Bronze Age: since the Final Bronze or the Early Iron Age a complex imagery of the nuraghi, in stone and other materials, displays their becoming iconic symbols of the Nuragic past.