Cagliari Archaeological Museum

On the morning of Friday 16 June, we climbed back up to the fortified part of the city. This gave us another wonderful view out across the city and harbour but, more importantly, got us to the gate of the old arsenal. Through this gateway are several museums and we had read that the best of these is the National Archaeological Museum.

Stone Age   

The route through the museum route is essentially chronological, which makes things very easy for the visitor. The first finds we saw were those from early Neolithic times: Mother Goddess statues, stone axe heads and obsidian spear and arrow tips.

Copper Age   

There then followed a display of Copper Age items: pots, bowls and jewellery.

Bronze Age   

Stone moulds for casting axe heads   

The Bronze Age items on display are far more numerous and include not only bronze axe heads, spear tips and knives but also, unusually, the stone moulds for casting the bronze items.

Models of Nuragic monuments. Fortified tower (L) ‘Giant’s graves’ (R)   

The Middle Bronze Age saw the emergence of the Nuragic civilisation in Sardinia, which is characterised by the thousands of impressive megalithic monuments that are scattered across the island. Of the these, only a small number have been excavated but it is clear that the Nuraghi (the towers and fortresses, where the latter essentially comprise several of the former clustered close together) were designed with protection of nearby domestic areas in mind. Also associated with the Nuragic civilisation, are megalithic burial sites, known as ‘Giants’ graves’. These consist of a long funerary chamber (intended as a burial place for hundreds of people but which seems more suitable for burying a giant, hence the name), in front of which is a semi-circular area for funeral ceremonies.

Bronze votive offering statues or ‘bronzetti’ (Nuragic period)   

Inside these burial chambers, archaeologists have found hundreds, if not thousands, of small, bronze votive statues. There are many different subjects – warriors, headmen, boxers, wrestlers, animals, boats etc, all subjects related to everyday life. The statues were originally produced by the Sardinian Nuragic civilisation but they, and copies of them, have also been found as far afield as Tunisia, Andalucia and Crete showing that the Nuragic civilisation had cultural and commercial links across the Mediterranean world, probably using trade routes managed by the Phoenicians. The statues were made using the ‘lost wax’ technique: the figurine is first made in wax; this is then encased in a clay (the mould); molten bronze is poured into the mould, melting the wax; when the bronze has hardened the mould is broken to release the statue. Interestingly, the lost wax technique is a manufacturing method that itself most likely reached Sardinia from Cyprus or the Near East.

Roman era   

Roman era miniature statue of St Peter    

Having examined hundreds of different bronzetti, we moved onto the Roman era. The Romans took over Sardinia in 238BC but it took another 11 years before the island, along with Corsica, became a legal and administrative subject of Rome. Romanisation was fiercely opposed by the Sardinians but their opposition was gradually overcome as merchants and contractors moved across from the Italian mainland, taking over vast tracts of land for agriculture, building villas and renewing the urban infrastructure. Apparently, there have been numerous Roman-era ceramic finds in Sardinia, most of them grave goods from cemeteries.

The Mont’e Prama sculptures   

The final part of the museum focusses on the Mont’e Prama sculptures. Like the bronzetti, these date from the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age when the Nuragic civilisation emerged. The sculptures appear to have been destroyed at some point in the intervening few thousand years but why this is the case is not understood. Nevertheless, work comparing the bronzetti with the remaining sections of the Mont’e Prama sculptures indicates that the same figures are represented (warriors, boxers, headmen) and that the iconography of the sculptures and the bronze statues is the same. However, the sculptures seem to differ somewhat stylistically from the bronzetti, with the sculpting techniques used to produce them having been developed in the Near East. It is, therefore, thought that the sculptures were produced by foreign artists brought into Sardinia to carry out the work, once more highlighting how extraordinarily interconnected the Mediterranean populations were so many thousands of years ago.

Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy