Archaeology Magazine - September/October 1987 - 31

No matter how crude the masonry,
entry ways were always well built .

dering in streams hidden by high
reeds, and dodging ever-present barking dogs and endless herds of sheep
and cows.
Meanwhile every piece of equipment was hauled along in anticipation of a great discovery. Often the
nuraghe turned out to be badly collapsed or just a pile of rocks; sometimes what we thought was just a
pile of rocks turned out to be a
nuraghe. However, no suspicious
mound was left uninspected.
Advance scouting didn't always
pay off. One extremely interesting
nuraghe selected for study in June

was completely filled with hay when
the group returned in July. One
morning the group arrived at
another pre-selected nuraghe moments elfter a cow had given birth to
her calf in the main entry way. We
quietly turned and tiptoed away. One
way to avoid such wasted time and
energy was to talk with the shepherds on whose land the nuraghi
were located. This always netted us
wine, cheese and delicious homemade Sardinian bread. The shepherds also provided a wealth of
information about nuraghi, including
names of the towers, other monuments in the vicinity, sources
of water, stone and other important
resources. Ultimately, for every
nuraghe finally chosen for our sample, at least five others were visited
and inspected.
The first nuraghe we tackled in
1982, Nuraghe Erimanzanu ("good
morning" in the Sardinian language)
had a full-grown oak tree growing on
the roof and a family of enormous
pigs living inside. The name was appropriate, for each morning we had
to enter the tower and, going from
room to room, rouse the father,
mother sind piglets, each asleep in a
different room or niche. At many
sites, cows seeking shade within the
cool interiors would not relinquish
their sanctuary without a fight.
Proud Sardinian horses grazing in
fields near our towers were a thrilling sight until they trampled our
backpacks and ate the fruit we had
packed for lunch. The appetite of
horses, however, paled in comparison
to that of the pigs, who gobbled our
maps smd site plans and just about
anything else left unattended.
Entering the nuraghi frequently
required courage and ingenuity. Even
finding the entry could mean hours
of hacking and cutting to remove underbrush which had sealed the building centuries ago. Sometimes the
tower was buried so deep that only
a narrow space at the top of the entryway was exposed. Frequently we
had to enter from above, climbing
through a second-level entry or scaling the outer walls and descending
the stairway.
lb understand how the buildings
were put together, we literally took
them apart piece by piece on the
drawing board. Efficiency, speed of
coding, accuracy of measurement,
and quantification of data were high

priorities. Because we used rotating
teams of architects and volunteers,
it was especially important to define
common points from which all measurements would be taken. We
devised ways to generate uniform
sets of information in every type
of situation and continuously worked
to standardize our measuring and
recording procedures. The varying
conditions of each nuraghe, existing at different levels of preservation
and buried to varying degrees,
required that a reference point be established that was almost always
present in each nuraghe in the sample.
This point was identified as the bottom of the lintel (BEL ) over the main
outer entryway. Measurements were
always taken from this level and we
were thus able to make comparisons
among a broader range of buildings.
Measuring the corbelled domes,
some as high as nine meters, proved
to be our greatest challenge. Obtaining
the exact height and curvature for
intact domes required great acts
of balance on swaying ladders stabilized on piles of stones, or acrobatic
skill in plumbing down from precarious positions high up in the vaultsplaces which only seconds earlier
had been occupied by bats.
Later we avoided some of the acrobatics by using a laser eyepiece
mounted on a theodolite. With this
method we were able to record accurate contours of the dome by taking
measurements at regular intervals
and reaching even the most inaccessible points. Our efforts were rewarded
as we were eventually able to distinguish groups of nuraghi with similar
dome shapes: high and pointed, low
and flat, high and rounded.
Other architectural features such
as stone shape, masonry patterns,
evenness of coursing, room position,
orientation of corridors, and types of
ceilings were also observed and
recorded. In this way, teams of architects, surveyors and UREP participants generated hundreds of detailed
measurements and attributes for
each building. Size, scale and style
were coded for building types as well
as for geographical zones.

have commonly
-Archaeologists
classified the nuraghi as either
"corridor" or "cupola"- dome in
Italian. A small group of buildings
1987 31
September/October

Archaeology Magazine - September/October 1987

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - September/October 1987