The Nuraghi of Sardinia: 7,000 Bronze Age Towers and No Satisfactory Explanation

Sardinia contains approximately 7,000 surviving nuraghi — truncated-cone towers of dry-stone construction, built between approximately 1800 and 700 BCE, distributed across the island at an average density of one per 3.5 square kilometres. The density is without parallel in the prehistoric Mediterranean: no other territory of equivalent size contains anything approaching this concentration of Bronze Age monumental architecture. What the nuraghi were for — their social function, their religious significance, whether they were defensive, administrative, astronomical, or some combination — remains, despite a century of systematic archaeology, genuinely unresolved.