Ora che il campionamento delle piante è finito, il prossimo passo di ZANBA può iniziare sul serio: l’estrazione e l’analisi dello stronzio. L’ alto livello di materiale organico nei campioni di piante rende l’estrazione dello stronzio un processo lungo – più lungo rispetto all’estrazione dello stronzio dai denti umani o animali che sono spesso l’obiettivo degli studi archeologici sullo stronzio. I campioni devono stare prima in acido nitrico concentrato per iniziare la “digestione” della materia organica. Una volta che l’acido nitrico ha reagito completamente con i campioni, va aggiunta una soluzione di perossido di idrogeno per continuare il processo di digestione. Il processo richiede molta attesa – può volerci più di una settimana perché le sostanze chimiche finiscano di reagire con i campioni.
Il tutto avviene in un clean lab sotto una cappa; quindi, il numero di campioni che può essere processato è limitato dallo spazio, dai rifornimenti, e dagli altri ricercatori che devono usare il laboratorio. Riuscire a processare tutti i 126 campioni sarà una sfida!
La digestione inizia
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 839517.
Most research in archaeology happens in a lab. Despite the images of sweaty excavators and big hats that come to mind when “archaeology” is mentioned, the bulk of archaeology happens when the digging is done. It’s a truism among project directors that you plan three days in the lab for every one day in the field, but the essential work that goes on behind the scenes is largely invisible to the public.
I’m a zooarchaeologist – an archaeologist who studies animal remains – and I do most of my work in labs. Right now, I’m working at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, where I study the bones of micromammals like mice and voles. These tiny remains were excavated from Bronze and Iron Age sites on the island of Sardinia (c. 1700-300 BCE), and despite their small size, they help me answer big questions about the cultures I study. Micromammals are sensitive to the environments around them. Different species have particular preferences for habitats and living conditions, which means that identifying the micromammals at a site is a way to reconstruct the site’s environment. And reconstructing the ancient environment is fundamental to understanding everything from past economies to climate change.
I use a microscope to examine bones for evidence of digestion by predators
A typical day of zooarchaeology includes multiple projects. Today, I’m working on three. I begin the day by tackling a taphonomic analysis of the micromammal remains. Taphonomy is the study of how ancient bones are incorporated into archaeological sites, and it includes everything that happens to the bones after the animals die. You can imagine why taphonomy would be important for interpreting ancient bones. Let’s say, for example, that the ancient environment was swampy, so the local micromammals were adapted to wet terrain. But if there were grasslands nearby, an ancient owl could nest in the swamp but hunt in the grasslands, scattering bones of grassland species around its nest. A case like this will give you a confusing mixture of grassland and wetland species showing up together – so what was the ancient environment really like? A careful taphonomic analysis can sort out which species died at the site and which were brought there by predators, helping differentiate the immediate local conditions from the wider surroundings.
Special software lets me capture detailed images of the micromammal teeth
After a morning in front of the microscope recording taphonomic clues, I’m ready to move to my second project. This project uses geometric morphometrics – a kind of spatial statistics – to analyze the shape of micromammal teeth. The shape of the teeth shows genetic plasticity, meaning that it changes depending on which groups of micromammals bred with each other. Looking at the shape of ancient teeth is therefore a way of tracing population dynamics, and when the only way new micromammals get to an island is by sneaking onto ships, ancient micromammal interactions become a proxy for ancient human interactions.
Drawers full of tiny reference skeletons at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle
I spend several hours taking images of the micromammal teeth. When I’ve captured images of all of the teeth, I’ll use specially developed software to compare the teeth with each other and with teeth from archaeological sites around the Mediterranean. Capturing the images takes up the major part of my day, but it’s only the beginning. Outlining each tooth so I can compare their shapes will take days. It’s a slow process, and I’ll work on it a little at a time after I return to the states.
I have just about an hour left in my day, so I decide to spend it studying. My third, long-term project is to do an environmental reconstruction for my site in Sardinia – Sa Conca Sa Cresia – which I excavated with my colleague Mauro Perra in 2009-2011. Even though we completed the excavations a while ago, I’ve only recently finished sorting the heavy fraction to remove the tiny micromammal bones. To prepare to do a complete environmental study, I first consult The Atlas of European Mammals to see which species are currently known to exist on the island. Then I visit the Muséum’s reference collections to familiarize myself with the characteristics of these species’ bones – and especially their highly diagnostic teeth.
The number and shape of the cusps make teeth “diagnostic,” meaning they can usually be assigned to a species
By the end of the day, my brain is fried. I cover the microscopes, turn off the lights, and make my way to the metro line 7, then transfer to the 6. I’m in a bit of a daze, but it’s a good kind of exhaustion – similar to how muscles feel after a trip to the gym. It’s an exhaustion that lets me know I deserve to take the night off. And there’s no better place for a night off than Paris.
Archaeologists love their equipment. Most of us can tell you when and where we got our first trowel, when and where we got our last trowel, whether we prefer a leaf blade or a pointing blade or a margin blade, why we buy Marshalltown or WHS or Battiferro. And it isn’t just our trowels. We’re obsessed with our hand picks, our Leatherman tools, our GPS units, our water bottles, our boots, and – perhaps the one realistic thing in the Indiana Jones movies – our hats.
It doesn’t stop with field archaeology. Lab archaeologists are just as intense about their microscopes and stereo macroscopes, their sonic cleaners and deionized water, their bags and bottles and pipettes. I’m as bad as the next archaeologist when it comes to equipment, so when a magnifying lamp I ordered finally arrived on Wednesday, I was stoked.
My lab in Sardinia is still being set up. I buy a few new pieces of equipment each time I return, and this year’s addition of a magnifying lamp is a significant upgrade. It enables me to take some time for a second zooarchaeological project that has been on the back burner for a year now. That project is looking for mouse teeth.
Yes, mouse teeth. Mouse teeth may sound insignificant, but these adorable, tiny fragments of ancient Rodentia are actually quite meaningful. Rodents are sensitive indicators of their local environments, and some species have particular relationships with humans that archaeologists use to understand how ancient people lived. In an ongoing research project that I’m pursuing in collaboration with the workgroup Mousetrack, run by Dr. Thomas Cucchi at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, I’m using different mouse species to understand when exchange relationships developed between Sardinia and the cultures of the East Mediterranean. This is an important question because archaeologists debate whether the prehistoric cultures of Sardinia were more isolated or more connected to other Mediterranean groups.
Sorting for mouse teeth with my new magnifying lamp
I took my new lamp to the lab first thing on Thursday morning and set it up at a specially reserved desk. This desk is now my mouse study desk, where I do the painstaking work of sifting through what archaeologists call “heavy fraction.”
When archaeologists dig, they collect a sample of sediment from every important stratigraphic layer. This sample of sediment is then mixed with water and agitated in a process called “flotation.” Flotation can be done by hand in a bucket or with a variety of more or less sophisticated pump-and-barrel mechanisms, but the point is to get carbonized plant remains to rise to the surface. The floating material – which sometimes also includes fish scales and tiny bones – is called the “light fraction.” We collect it using an extremely fine mesh like chiffon and dry it carefully, preferably out of direct sunlight (if carbonized seeds dry too quickly, the difference between the dry surface and the wet interior can make them break).
The stuff that doesn’t float during the flotation process is also collected, usually in a slightly larger mesh with holes about 1 mm2. This is the heavy fraction, and it’s where we find lots of tiny animal bones as well as pottery, chipped stone, metal, glass – any heavy material that breaks into small pieces. The tiny artifacts that show up in heavy fraction can be fascinating. Beads and jewelry, nails, pins, and fragments of carved bone are all common. Food waste is also common, and evidence for small foods like eggs, fish, and sea urchins is often recovered only in the heavy fraction.
The heavy fraction I’m sorting comes from my excavation of the early Nuragic site Sa Conca Sa Cresia, located on the small plateau near Siddi, Sardinia, that also includes Sa Fogaia. I co-directed the excavation of Sa Conca Sa Cresia with Sardinian archaeologist Dr. Mauro Perra between 2009-2011. The excavation was very successful and our analysis of the resulting artifacts is ongoing – a good rule of thumb is that archaeologists expect to spend three days in the lab for every one day of excavation.
At first, sorting heavy fraction feels like doing excavation in miniature. It’s exciting to notice the shiny flakes of obsidian, the broken pottery, the piglet toes and lizard jaws and frog legs as they emerge from the tiny rocks that make up 99% of the heavy fraction. After a while, though, I start to get nervous. Where are the mouse teeth? Why haven’t I found one? Will I end up finding any at all, or will I just spend hours of precious research time looking for something that isn’t there? The problem, of course, is that there’s only one way to answer these questions, and that is to get in there and sort.
Got one!
Realistically, I was rewarded pretty quickly with my first mouse tooth. And not just any tooth, a first molar of the mandible: the specific tooth that is most useful for my study. My heart leapt a little as I recognized the characteristic shape, and I picked it up gingerly and transferred it to a plastic specimen tray. I couldn’t say immediately what species the tooth belonged to – that requires careful cleaning and more powerful magnification – but the tooth was the right size to be one of the species I’m interested in.
It was an exciting find, and it re-energized me for a while. But after a couple of hours, the frustration crept back in. Then the concern. Obsessively, I sorted on.
When you’re invested in the outcome, sorting heavy fraction feels like playing a weird archaeological slot machine. I use flexible tweezers to spread out a small pile of sediment, then examine it minutely with the magnifying lamp. “C’mon, mouse tooth!” I say to myself as I flick past the ribs and toes and vertebrae that aren’t relevant for my study. There’s lots of what I don’t want, but is there anything I do want? No, nothing. I push this pile of sediment to the other side of my tray and start a new pile: “C’mon, mouse tooth…”
The hope is addictive. The possibility that each little pile of sediment might hold the tooth I’m looking for. The possibility that the tooth might belong to a significant species. The possibility that enough significant teeth will add up to a significant find, a meaningful advance in what we as humans know about our past. Students sorting heavy fraction for the first time usually put down their tweezers after fifteen minutes. “You do this all day?” they ask in disbelief. “Don’t you get bored???”
Yes, I get bored. But I stay hopeful.
After non-stop sorting for three days, I’m almost finished. I currently have eight new teeth, an average of less than one tooth for every liter of sediment. I’m hoping to find one more, but the sediment I’m working on now includes very little cultural material of any kind. There are only the rarest fragments of pottery, obsidian, or bone. Still, you never know. I always have hope.
Today is the seventh day of my bone study. I’ve been getting up at 5:30 am, arriving at the lab before the sun is above the horizon. The bakery across the street is the only building where the lights are on. I’ve worked seven to ten hours every day since I started last Saturday, and I’ve identified 1028 specimens so far, an average of 146 specimens per day.
When I plan a zooarchaeological study, I estimate that I can do 200 specimens in an eight-hour workday, 25 specimens per hour. Most of the time, I hit this rate. Sometimes I even exceed it. But what I forget is that this is the ideal rate, the rate I achieve after I’m settled into a study, with my database exactly how I want it, my reference materials in familiar locations on my laptop and work table, the measurements I need to take fresh in my mind. I forget that this is not my rate during the first week of the study.
Each bag starts out a jumble
Careful research takes time, and preparing a study is one of the most time-consuming parts. It took me this whole week of working with the specimens to get my database sorted out. I started designing the database before the bones were back in the lab. I made a list of everything I needed to record and how I would record it. It took a full day to create the database in Filemaker, then a second full day to edit and improve it. When I started identifying specimens on Saturday morning, the database included 111 fields. But in the past seven days, it has grown to 125 fields: working with the material has reminded me of important types of evidence that slipped my mind during the design phase. I was still adding fields to the database yesterday, and who knows – I may realize tomorrow there’s yet another field that should be added. But I’m crossing my fingers that I’ve finally hit the point of diminishing returns.
For every specimen I look at, there are 125 types of evidence I may have to record. I can usually eliminate many after a brief glance. For example, I don’t have to record the circumference of the shaft on a bone that doesn’t have a shaft. But some types of evidence take time to figure out. One of the hard ones is carnivore gnawing. Dogs and other carnivores often gnaw bones, and their teeth leave marks that are fairly easy to recognize on a fresh bone. But when that bone is also gnawed by rodents, then exposed to the elements causing cracking and flaking, then buried and etched by the twisting roots of plants, it becomes much harder to decide whether a particular pattern of indentations comes from the teeth of a carnivore or from some other type of modification, what bone specialists call taphonomic processes.
Then I start to organize – by species, by bone type…
Teasing out taphonomic processes isn’t the only thing that takes time. Today, I had to investigate several bags that had been mislabeled. Figuring out their correct contextual information was a small feat of detective work. Fortunately, I keep good records, but the puzzle had me rereading the project notebook I kept back in 2009-2011 to see exactly which units my team was excavating on – for example – 14 June 2010. Needless to say, I did not average 25 specimens during those hours.
But these are the frustrating things that slowed me down. There were also exciting things. One of the great joys of archaeological research is the unexpected discoveries. As I examined my specimens for signs of taphonomic processes, I also noticed that several showed characteristic burnishing on the points and edges, a sign that they had been used as tools. I bagged and labeled each one and set them aside for a colleague who specializes in analyzing worked bone. Studying bone tool production is new in Nuragic archaeology, and the work my colleague will do to understand the worked bone industry at my site, Sa Conca Sa Cresia (Middle Bronze Age, c. 1700-1450 BCE), will result in only the second publication of its kind. As my colleague says, “È tutto da scoprire” – it’s all to be discovered.
So there are many reasons why research takes forever, but take forever it does. I’m a little nervous looking at the many bags of bones. Will I manage to identify every single one? At this point, I can’t say. But, like a good scientist, I took the time to design my study carefully. I will at least have a statistically significant sample – enough evidence to draw robust conclusions about the animal economy at my early Nuragic site.
Yesterday, it rained. Not a hard rain, but a steady one. The clouds rolled in, set up shop, and kept at it all day, though they did take some coffee breaks and a pretty long lunch. It rained until dinner – a soft patter punctuated by the songs of the more courageous birds – and then began again during the night. I woke up this morning to a misty sky and wet pavement.
The mood in the bar yesterday was one of subdued relief. People were quieter than usual, listening to the rain outside. As I sipped my morning cappuccino, one of my friends said: “watch, the whole landscape will change.”
Like most of the Mediterranean, Sardinia has been going through a severe drought. I ask how long it’s been since there was rain. Six months? Longer, they tell me. The news is full of statistics on the drop in agricultural production. Unripe pomegranates hang broken on the trees, their skins split by the arid winds. The blackberries on the plateau are shrunken and juiceless, so dry they break if I squeeze them. All this year’s fruit is smaller, and less. The figs are tiny. The vines bear fewer grapes, fewer tomatoes, fewer melons. The almonds are shriveled in their shells.
But yesterday, it rained. By mid-morning, a smell of warm clay filled the streets as water soaked into the hard-baked dust. By afternoon, the smell was of living soil with all its tiny life waking up and cautiously carrying on. And by evening, as I walked home from the little town library, the breeze carried a scent of keen freshness, like cutting into a watermelon that’s still a little green.
This rain came too late for the summer fruit. Most of what produce there is has already been gathered. But I’m looking forward to my next long walk in the fields or up on the plateau. I’m looking forward to watching the landscape change – if we’re lucky – just in time to plant the winter grains.
I’m delighted to say I’m in the lab for my first full day of bone analysis. I worried that retrieving my materials from the museum where they were stored would take weeks, but our exceptional representatives at the Soprintendenza processed our permit in record time, and I collected the bones on Thursday. I spent yesterday morning finishing the database and yesterday afternoon finalizing my methodology. Now it’s Saturday morning, and here I am.
The beginning of a study is always intimidating. Even though I’m the one who excavated these bones, even though I know this archaeology inside and out, I look at the two crates filled with upwards of 5000 fragments and I think: “how will I ever…”
I know what’s waiting for me. I know there will be fragments I don’t recognize. I know there will be times when I turn a fragment over and over under the light, trying to decide if a series of round-ish dents are evidence of trampling or the marks of a dog’s teeth. I know there will be bones I need to reconstruct, bones I need to photograph, bones I need to set aside for further study. I know it will be a challenge.
I could stand here for hours, eyeing the bags of bones like I would the surface of a cold lake, but the best way forward is just to jump in.
So I do. And I’m right: on this first day, everything is a struggle. I realize I left several important fields out of my database, so now I have to add them. Several other fields aren’t in the right format and I have to change them. Several of the fields are too small to display the relevant information, so I have to make them bigger. Then I accidentally link one of the new fields to one of the old fields and can’t figure out how to unlink them, so I have to erase them both and start again.
It’s slow going, and the light isn’t great. I need to get a desk lamp. I need to organize my reference materials. I need to make a key for the various codes I’m using and write it on an index card. I need to find my photo scales.
That’s one bag down…
I’m not even going to tell you how long it took to identify my first bag of bones. It’s too disheartening. What I will tell you – and myself – is that it gets better. The first day is awful. The second day is hard. The third day, however, is when I start to find a rhythm. And on the fourth day, I pick up the pace. There are many long days ahead of me, but the worst one is now behind me. I plan to celebrate with pizza.
The corridor nuraghe Sa Fogaia is one of my favorite monuments in Sardinia for many reasons. Some of those reasons are personal. Sa Fogaia was the first monument I explored on the Siddi Plateau. It was my first experience of the archaeology of the Middle Bronze Age, a fascinating period when the Nuragic Culture was first developing and the social and cultural practices that later became widespread were just being figured out. Sa Fogaia also happens to be located on the edge of a windswept plateau overlooking broad, golden lowlands that are striped by olive groves and dotted with small towns. I can’t deny the exhilaration of emerging from the ancient staircase and gazing out over that view.
The view from Sa Fogaia
But the main reasons I love Sa Fogaia are archaeological. Sa Fogaia is an unusual monument as corridor nuraghi go, which makes it an important reminder that – as useful as broad categorizations are – they can obstruct our understanding of human social processes when we rely on them too heavily.
What do I mean by that? If you read the scholarly literature on corridor nuraghi (which is easier if you read Italian, but there are a few things published in English), you’ll find statements that describe corridor nuraghi as having
“… strong rough stone walls and smaller internal areas…. There is no typical floor plan and some are elliptical, some quadrilateral, and some circular. All of the monuments have an internal corridor which is either straight or elbow (‘a gomito’). The buildings may have two entrances. Sometimes, apart from the corridor, there are other small spaces. It is not rare to find a stone stairway in the corridor, which leads up to an upper terrace. We hypothesize that the original buildings were between eight and fifteen meters high.” (Depalmas and Melis 2010: 169)
This is an accurate summary and serves as a good introduction to the concept of corridor nuraghi, which is what the authors intended to provide (I assign this article as background reading when I bring students to the field). But if – like me – you’re fascinated by corridor nuraghi in particular, you should note an important phrase: “Sometimes, apart from the corridor, there are other small spaces. It is not rare to find a stone stairway in the corridor, which leads up to an upper terrace.” This phrase covers a lot of real architectural variation among corridor nuraghi, variation that is important for understanding social processes among early Nuragic people but that isn’t highlighted when all corridor nuraghi are put in the same category.
I won’t attempt an exhaustive comparison of Sa Fogaia with all known corridor nuraghi – that would be material for a master’s thesis – but I will point out some features that make Sa Fogaia interesting.
Stones in the lower courses of the false-tholos chamber are smaller than those in the upper courses
The first thing to note about Sa Fogaia is its complexity. Most corridor nuraghi are structurally pretty simple, but Sa Fogaia is downright impressive in the number of chambers, corridors, and staircases it includes. Especially impressive is Sa Fogaia’s beautiful “false-tholos” chamber. It is notoriously difficult to photograph inside nuraghi, but this picture shows the important detail of a false-tholos chamber: unlike in a true tholos chamber, where the stones are smaller at the top than at the bottom, the stones in a false-tholos chamber get larger as you build higher, and the great weight of the stones themselves is used to counter-balance the small part of the stone that overhangs the empty space of the chamber. It’s a technique that succeeds in creating a comparatively large open space, but the result is much too massive to allow a second chamber to be built on top of the first. False-tholos chambers are rare, making Sa Fogaia one of only a few examples of how Nuragic architects experimented with construction techniques to arrive at the true tholos style that enabled them to build the multi-story towers of the later Nuragic period.
But the architects of Sa Fogaia didn’t stop after building the false tholos. They couldn’t build more false-tholos chambers on the second story, but they did create an elevated paved terrace that could be used as work or living space (some corridor nuraghi show evidence of huts being built on these terraces), as well as a corridor leading to the remains of a small chamber and two staircases: one that leads down to the courtyard below and one that leads tantalizingly upward, evidence that there was once a third story of some kind.
The staircase leading downward is another important feature of Sa Fogaia. At one point,
The entrance to the staircase was partially blocked with smaller stones
the staircase appears to have lead all the way to the courtyard, but at a later phase the bottom part was blocked up, making it harder to get up to the top if you’re trying to enter the staircase from the courtyard. Dating different phases of stone architecture is extremely difficult, so it’s currently impossible to say whether this change was made during the Nuragic period or during a phase of later reoccupation (and Sa Fogaia hosted a fairly extensive re-occupation in the late Punic and Roman periods). However, it’s interesting to note that this change made the upper part of the nuraghe a little more “exclusive.”
Although we can’t be sure when this change to Sa Fogaia was made, it’s interesting to think about it in terms of other nuraghi in the area. The UNESCO World Heritage site Nuraghe Su Nuraxi is only about 10km away, and Su Nuraxi, though it dates to a later phase of Nuragic development, also shows evidence of changing over time to create greater exclusivity. When it was first built, Su Nuraxi had an entrance at ground level and numerous small openings to the outside, probably to allow light into the structure. But a later refacing wall was built around the entirety of Su Nuraxi, and this wall closed off all the ground-level openings and created a new entrance 7m above ground level. The new entrance could only be reached by a ladder or staircase, and anyone entering the structure then had to navigate a narrow passage through the walls before using a second ladder or staircase to descend into the courtyard.
Spatial exclusivity like this can serve many functions in a society, and it often serves more than one at a time. Exclusive spaces can emphasize the social differences between the people who are allowed in and the people who aren’t, and this in turn can be used to justify unequal power relationships. Exclusive spaces can also be protective: they make it physically difficult for people to get in, both disaffected members of the group as well as hostile outsiders. When we’re speculating about the meaning of spatial exclusivity in nuraghi in particular, it’s important to remember that nuraghi of all periods show great diversity in their construction, including highly varying degrees of spatial exclusivity. It’s impossible to answer the question “what were the nuraghi for” on anything other than a site-by-site or system-by-system basis.
What was once at the top of this steep little staircase?
A final thing I love about Sa Fogaia is how much evidence there is that the structure was once even more complex than we see now. This little bit of staircase is preserved in part of the wall of the courtyard. What it once led to is impossible to say. A small platform? An extension of the second story? Perhaps another terrace? Whatever it was, it’s a reminder that the monument we see now is only part of the original construction. Corridor nuraghi are often treated as a uniform set of structures whose main historical function is to usher in the multi-story towers of the later Nuragic period. This approach is shown in the traditional architectural typology of nuraghi, in which “corridor nuraghi” are usually a single group and only the later tholos structures are divided into “simple” structures with a single tower and “complex” structures with multiple towers. But Sa Fogaia shows that corridor nuraghi also range from the simple to the highly complex, a strong indication that the social interactions that made architectural differentiations important in the later Nuragic Culture were already developing in the beginning.
* Depalmas, A. and R. T. Melis. 2010. The Nuragic People: Their Settlements, Economic Activities and Use of the Land, Sardinia, Italy. In Landscapes and Societies, Martini and Chesworth (eds.), pp. 167-186. Springer Science+Business Media B.V., Dordrecht.
Evening sun shining down the staircase leading up from the false-tholos chamber
I’ve been in Sardinia less than two weeks, and I’ve been called out twice for not doing enough to share my research in Italian. It’s a fair criticism. I gave a well-attended public lecture in Italian at the end of the excavation I co-directed with Dott. Mauro Perra in 2009-2011, but since then I’ve done very little. The reasons are complex, and I did offer to give five weeks of public lectures on local archaeology in the summer of 2014, but it was eventually decided that English lessons would be a bigger draw (and I have to say, I delivered my English lessons to a packed house, and many Siddesi still greet me on the street with an accented “how are you”).
But the criticism stands, and the fact is archaeologists face a variety of challenges that can discourage us from speaking directly to the communities where we work. Combatting this issue is one of the missions of Public Scholar Outreach, a non-profit organization that two colleagues and I founded this year. It’s also the reason why the book I’m preparing with Dott. Perra to publish the results of our excavation will have summaries of each of the chapters in Italian. But the book won’t be out for a couple of years, and that’s too long to wait to start redressing this problem.
On my way to Sa Fogaia
Which is why I found myself trekking through Siddi’s countryside at sunset in search of tweet-worthy images of local archaeology. Italy celebrates European Heritage Days this month (September 23/24), and so in honor of Sardinian heritage, Public Scholar Outreach is featuring a full month of bilingual tweets and Facebook posts celebrating the archaeology and history of this beautiful island (follow us @ScholarOutreach).
I set off just after 6pm, phone in hand, to capture the fading light at one of my favorite monuments: the corridor nuraghe Sa Fogaia. Corridor nuraghi date to the early development of the Nuragic Culture during the Sardinian Middle Bronze Age (c. 1700-1365 BCE). They don’t reach the impressive heights of the later tholos nuraghi, but many – including Sa Fogaia – are complex structures with several chambers, multiple stories, and architectural features that suggest successive building episodes. Corridor nuraghi are often treated briefly in the scholarly literature. Few have been well excavated and even fewer published, and in many corridor nuraghi, later reuse destroyed the early Nuragic deposits, so even careful excavation may result in limited new information.
Because the corridor nuraghi are less frequently excavated and their deposits often damaged, our understanding of the early development of the Nuragic Culture is limited. Raising interest in these structures is one way to encourage more research to get done. So I walk. The most direct path to Sa Fogaia climbs a few gentle hills and then rises steeply up the side of the Siddi Plateau, the site of an important Middle Bronze Age settlement system of which Sa Fogaia is only one part. I pass a shepherd and his flock, and we exchange a few words about the coolness of the evening after the painfully hot day. He’s not someone I know, and he seems pleased that a foreigner is on her way to see the nuraghe. “There are lots on the plateau,” he tells me. I nod.
The last few meters up the wooded sides of the plateau
It’s a sweaty climb to the top, but the view, as always, is worth it. Sa Fogaia glows in the slanting sunlight and I get several good photos for Facebook and Twitter. Turning these photos into informative posts and tweets that will encourage people to engage with Sardinian archaeology is a whole other challenge, of course, but tonight I’ve taken an important first step.
Yesterday was my first day back in the deposito, and I was delighted to find it in great shape: everything where I left it, the electronic equipment still working, no mold anywhere. There was barely a spider that had set up a web among the bags of pottery. While I’ve been away, the Comune even came and attached the plumbing, so whereas last year we constantly carried equipment to an outdoor tap to wash it, this year I have a functioning sink right in the lab. (Tante grazie al Comune di Siddi!)
There was one negative surprise, however. It turns out that the bones I was convinced were stored in the deposito are currently housed in a museum in another town about 5 km away. These bones are, of course, precisely the materials I came here to study.
It isn’t a major problem, and if it’s the worst thing that happens during the study, I’ll be in great shape. Still, archaeology is surrounded by bureaucracy in almost any country, and Italy is not an exception. Taking those four crates of bones, putting them in a vehicle, and driving them 5 km to the deposito will take days. There will be permit applications, calls to the Soprintendenza, organizing a day when we can use the Comune’s truck…
So when a friend asked me if I wanted to spend this morning helping him harvest his vineyard, I said sure!
In the vineyard before the sun, the heat… and the wasps
I got up at 6am and dressed for fieldwork – my Northface pants, a long-sleeved shirt with a high spf rating, hiking boots, work gloves, sunscreen, a hat. Then we drove to the vineyard – a short distance outside the town – where we met five friends who were also lending a hand.
Bunches of bovale wrapped around the wire trellises
It’s a small vineyard divided between two Sardinian grapes – bovale and monica – with a row of table grapes as well. We started with the bovale, which was difficult to harvest. The grapes are small and the clusters grow in tangles with themselves, the branches of the vine, the wire trellises the vines are tied to, really anything they can wrap a tendril around. It was hard work just figuring out where to cut, and even then we had to untangle the grapes before they would fall into our large plastic baskets.
The monica was simpler. The grapes are slightly larger and the clusters tend to hang down one by one. It was easier to see the stems, to insert our shears among the leaves and branches, to gather the clusters once they were cut. All in all, the seven of us made short work of the harvest. We finished before 9am, when the air was still too cool for the wasps to come out, but late enough that we could tell today was going to break 37°C (100°F) again. Another hot day in a series of hot days in a series of dry weeks stretching back for months. The effect of the drought was clearly visible in the grapes, some of which appeared to be drying on the vine before they had even fully ripened.
The crusher made short work of separating the grapes from the stems
The wine production takes places in my friend’s garage, and the first step was to turn our fresh grapes into must. We slowly poured each basket into an electric crusher, which spat out the stems – or most of them – and dropped the juice and crushed grapes into large plastic vats below. At the end, the vat of bovale was knee-high, and the vat of monica was only slightly lower. They told me it wasn’t much this year because of the drought, but it still looked impressive to me.
The must has to stand for a week to let the fermentation begin. We’ll go stir it a few times, then press it and bottle it. It seems almost too simple to result in the excellent wine I’m used to drinking at my friend’s table.
“È tutto?” I ask in some disbelief.
“È tutto,” they assure me.
We can’t resist tasting our work before we go. There’s a fine screen we press down on the must to let just the juice through, then we scoop up the juice in a plastic cup. Both are delicious. The bovale is intensely sweet and rich tasting, the monica slightly less sweet with a flavor closer to table grapes. Some complain that it’s too sweet, but it seems the intense sugar is expected in a drought year. Drought years produce little wine, they tell me, but the wine you get is very good. I’ll have to return next summer and see.
Vacation has come to an end. Tomorrow I go to the Comune to request keys for the deposito where the artifacts are stored. I start designing a database to record the bones in my zooarchaeological study. I buy a good desk lamp. I park myself in the Biblioteca Comunale and take advantage of the free wifi to answer a long list of emails. I go through the proofs for my edited volume.
But this week of vacation has been glorious, spent relaxing with friends on several of Sardinia’s beaches, and Sardinia’s beaches are gems. They tend to be small – narrow strips of sand caught between junipers and jutting rocks – reached only after turning off the road and driving several minutes down a dirt trail.
There’s often a kiosk selling coffee and gelato, maybe a simple restaurant, and that’s generally it in terms of services: most beaches are minimally “improved.” The ideal of the wild beach, sometimes reached only after leaving the car in an unpaved parking lot and hiking an hour down a dry riverbed, is one many Sardinians hold dear.
I have to agree with them. The beaches I saw this week weren’t even among the really wild, and they were stunning in their natural beauty. It’s hard to describe them without sounding cliché. The water deepens from aqua to almost purple as you look toward the horizon. It’s so clear I often watched my shadow on the rippled sand below me as I swam. Rising behind the beaches are slopes of rock and evergreen maquis broken only by occasional clumps of houses. Even these houses are the source of some complaint – my friends love to recount how, a few decades ago, there weren’t so many houses and the beaches were truly wild.
I find myself torn between wishing more people knew about the beauty of Sardinia and fearing that one day they will. That one day, not only the Costa Smeralda but also the Costa Rei will be covered with slick palazzi and high-end boutiques. That the Costa Verde will turn from a wildlife refuge to a stretch of strip malls. Most Sardinians show admirable stewardship of their lovely beaches: they don’t take the sand or rocks or shells, they do take all their garbage. I just hope further development will be in this same Sardinian spirit.
Errant 