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.
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
Errant 