The S’Urachi Project: Cultural Encounters and Everyday Life around a Nuraghe in Phoenician and Punic Sardinia

Summary

Nuraghi, the famous dry-stone walled towers of Sardinia, are usually just regarded as prehistoric monuments of the Bronze Age. They continued to be inhabited long after, however, and were transformed into often substantial settlements of later periods. Nuraghi are key sites for the investigation of the colonial encounters and cultural interactions between local Sardinians, Phoenician traders and Punic settlers, because they are the only places that were continuously inhabited before and during the colonial presence of Phoenicians and Carthaginians in Sardinia.

Nuraghe S’Urachi is situated in the Upper Campidano and Gulf of Oristano regions of west central Sardinia. Standing halfway between the Monti Ferru to the north and the Cabras salt marshes to the south, S’Urachi is located in a resource-rich landscape at just 15 miles away from the Phoenician colonial settlement of Tharros. Numerous imports and local adaptations testify to a long history of cultural and colonial entanglements.

In this poster, key results of the past five years of excavation at S’Urachi, are presented, showing first of all the continuity of occupation throughout the first millennium BCE, and the extent and depth of cultural interactions at the site between Phoenicians and Iron Age ‘Nuragic’ Sardinians.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20475