Papers of the British School at Rome http://journals.cambridge.org/ROM Additional services for Papers of the British School at Rome: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Dolmens and Nuraghi of Sardinia Duncan Mackenzie Papers of the British School at Rome / Volume 6 / January 1913, pp 127 - 170 DOI: 10.1017/S0068246200001240, Published online: 09 August 2013 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0068246200001240 How to cite this article: Duncan Mackenzie (1913). Dolmens and Nuraghi of Sardinia. Papers of the British School at Rome, 6, pp 127-170 doi:10.1017/S0068246200001240 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/ROM, IP address: 128.218.248.209 on 21 Mar 2015 PAPERS OF THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ROME VOL. VI. No. 2 DOLMENS AND NURAGHI OF SARDINIA. BY DUNCAN MACKENZIE. OUR expedition of 1909 to Sardinia lasted throughout the month of October. Mr. F. G. Newton was present all the time, and after our work upon the Megalithic Monuments was at an end, he even found time to study and draw many of the interesting Pisan churches in the island. The Archaeological Authorities at Cagliari followed our work with their usual cordial interest. Important archaeological investigations in another part of the island prevented Professor Taramelli from saluting us at Macomer as he had wished ; while Cavaliere Filippo Nissardi was kept at Cagliari by official duties, which did not leave him time to meet us at Nuoro or elsewhere on our way. Our hunt for dolmens, in which as will be seen we had considerable fortune, would have been all the keener for the company of veterans like these. The wanderer in Sardinia is always getting to the back of beyond, for he must leave behind him those horrid fields of Vulcan that divide the island into two from Monti to Torralba, from Cagliari to Macomer. The magic of ugliness is there in a desolate land. But going east athwart the barrier of granite hills, he will see Sardinia's beauty where Sardinia's heart is : in Gennargentu. And if he is wise, and after dolmens or sport upon the mountains, he will always go beyond. One of the beyonds is the 128 THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ROME. plateau of Bitti with its dark fringe of primeval forest, and the remote village of Bitti is at the back of that. We reached this back of the upland from Nuoro. Our way to Bitti was past Orune, a village, it is said, in former days of daring bandits, and still of ill repute. The sullen grandeur of its scenery, with gorge and forest near and a background of savage mountains in the distance, made it seem the proper setting for a stage of bandits. Our manner of travel was by stage coach, as it might have been in the days of bandits. And many a glade remotely luminous amid the coppices of cork or ilex forest would give a boy's own shiver of eerie feeling as we were told of wild deeds of yore and of still recent days committed in illicit haunts by the way. Then we got to Bitti, all in high festival of its Patron Saint, and we at once regretted the somewhat illicit peace of Orune. We did not know till then that Bitti was at the back of the plateau, and not airily on the verge of that as it should have been. In a hollow so deep there was little radiant vista of the morning, and no prospect anywhere at evening of the wide luminous west. The true heart of the plateau is Osidda. It is where Bitti should have been, and Bitti is but a name ! Yet strange anomaly of peasant life ! Osidda's women have lost their costume and go about in perpetual mourning of jet and black and in an ungainly mode of forty years ago. But Bitti is staunch where Osidda is not, and hardly anywhere in all Sardinia will one see anything like the slashed sleeves and goffered kilt skirts of Bitti. We saw them at the festival in a mazy dance of ancient days that seemed the legend of the Labyrinth in symbolic action. And nothing there could rival them were it not the clinging skirts with finest pleats innumerable of the slender women of Fonni and Gavoi. Those women of Gennargentu knew the prestige of their costume too, and showed it off to full advantage in their rapid native dance with a whirl of skirts that was all their own. Nuraghe Usanis near Osidda. I visited the Nuraghe of Usanis along with that of Voes and others on the plateau of Bitti on the occasion of my first expedition to Sardinia some years ago. I was accompanied by Cavaliere Nissardi, who out of his large experience was the first to give me a true understanding of those DOLMENS AND NURAGHI OF SARDINIA. 129 monuments. It was our ill-luck that official duties at Cagliari kept the Cavaliere from joining us on subsequent expeditions, for we knew how strong for him was the call of the Sardinian wilds, and how much the uncanny spell of the Nuraghi was upon a man who knows those, and in one large embrace with them loves Sardinia as no one else ever will. In him profound instruction and genial company were joined in one to make every passeggiata archeologica a delight. The Nuraghe is situated on a mass of rock-boulders, a little to the right of the high road from Osidda to Bitti and about twenty minutes away from the village. All around is the undulating open moorland of the Bitti plateau with its characteristic thickets of bramble and other scrub and its maze of boundary dykes. Several other Nuraghi scattered at points of vantage on boulders of the plateau are in sight, but Nuraghe Voes itself is hid from view in remoter distance. The Nuraghe of Usanis, occupying as it does a prominent position in full view of the high road to Bitti, is a favourite haunt of shepherds who probably have intimate reasons of their own for making it a tower of outlook. In their handsome Bitti costume they lend their own striking dash of local colour to the character- istic pastoral scene. Proud as they are and yet debonair, they are the true shepherd kings of the upland and the men of Osidda hate them well. Signor Nissardi had brought me on purpose to see Nuraghe Usanis as an interesting example of the fortified character of these monuments. All this comes out very clearly on the Plan (Fig. 1). The central cellas of the Nuraghe are built on to the rock boulders and reinforced by massive out- work walls of circumvallation in a way which makes the fastness patent to every eye. The combination of the two cellas is curious and the through passage between them with a niche, is a singular feature probably recom- mended by peculiar local conditions. In the entrance passage to the cellas we observed no niche or stair, and it is thus possible that there was no upper story ; the smaller chamber may have served instead. The outer wall of circumvallation on the north-east side probably enclosed part of the Nuraghe settlement within it. The front of the Nuraghe system faces south. The material of con- struction is the granite of the district, as in the other monuments which we shall describe. On an adjoining knoll three minutes away on the south- east side is a much ruined Tomba di Gigante and this was probably the family sepulchre of the people of the Nuraghe. K I3O THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ROME. The Nnraghe of Sotteri. The Nuraghe of Sotteri shown in Fig. 2 is situated in an open valley on the forest track between Osidda and Budduso. It is inhabited by local shepherds who have roofed over its cella temporarily for their own purposes. FIG. I.—NURAGHE USANIS, NEAR OSIDDA. The monument, which externally appears to be of the normal type, shows one or two anomalies. The entrance corridor has no niche on the usual right-hand side but here the stair goes up instead to the second floor. The cella has the customary three niches, but one finds to one's surprise on entering the left hand niche that an extra stair ascends from this presumably to the third floor. DOLMENS AND NURAGHI OF SARDINIA. 131 The roof of the ground floor chamber as well as the whole of the second and third storeys has disappeared. The Nuraghe faces south. The Nuraghe of Loelle near Budduso. The Nuraghe of Loelle is situated in an open coppice wood on the left-hand side of the road from Budduso to Bitti (PI. XXIX. SECTION • A, A FIG. 2.—NURAGHE SOTTERI, NEAR OSIDDA. Fig. 1.) The road from Budduso winds away gradually upwards on to the plateau for an hour or more through forests of cork and ilex with massive granite boulders before Loelle is reached. The sombre ruins of the great Nuraghe lend an uncanniness all ^their own to the desolate upland scene. K 2 132 THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ROME. There is again a grim suggestiveness in the dreary track that just in front of the Nuraghe leads eastward to the penal settlement of Bitti. The excessive rigours of bureaucratic laws in the institutions dealing with crime like those of France and Italy often mean much that is horrible and ugly in these southern lands and the one blot on the beauty and grandeur of that landscape is that weary track to the Colonia Penale of Bitti.