An elite force of prehistoric
warriors – carved from solid rock in the western Mediterranean 2700 years ago –
is rising from oblivion.
Archaeologists and conservation experts on the Italian island of Sardinia
have succeeded in re-assembling literally thousands of fragments of smashed
sculpture to recreate a small yet unique army of life-size stone warriors which
were originally destroyed by enemy action in the middle of the first millennium
BC.
It’s the only group of sculpted life-sized warriors ever found in Europe. Though consisting of a much smaller number of
figures than China’s famous
Terracotta Army, the Sardinia example is 500
years older and is made of stone rather than pottery.
After an eight year conservation and reconstruction program, 25 of the
original 33 sculpted stone warriors – archers, shield-holding ‘boxers’ and
probable swordsmen – have now been substantially re-assembled.
The warriors were originally sculpted and placed on guard over the
graves of elite Iron Age Sardinians, buried in the 8 century BC.
The stone guardians are thought to have represented the dead individuals or to
have acted as their eternal body-guards and retainers.
However, within a few centuries, the Carthaginians (from what is now Tunisia) invaded Sardinia
– and archaeologists suspect that it was they who smashed the stone warriors
(and stone models of native fortress shrines) into five thousand fragments.
It’s likely that the small sculpted army - and the graves they were guarding - were
seen by the invaders as important symbols of indigenous power and status.
The site was abandoned and forgotten. Carthaginian control of Sardinia gave way to Roman, then Vandal, then Byzantine,
Pisan, Aragonese, Spanish, Austrian, Savoyard and finally Italian rule.
The thousands of fragments were
rediscovered only in the 1970s – and were excavated in the early 1980s by
Italian archaeologist Carlo Troncheti. Two of the statues were then re-assembled
– but the vast majority of the material was put into a local museum store where
it stayed until 2004 when re-assembly work on the fragments was re-started by
conservators in Sassari, northern Sardinia.
Sardinia’s newly recreated ‘stone army’ is set to focus attention on one
of the world’s least known yet most impressive ancient civilizations – the
so-called Nuragic culture which dominated the island from the 16
century BC to the late 6 century BC. Its Bronze Age heyday was in
the mid second millennium BC - roughly from the 16 to the 13
century BC, when it constructed some of the most impressive architectural
monuments ever produced in prehistory.
Even today, the remains of 7000 Nuragic fortresses (the oldest castles
in Europe) still dominate the landscape of Sardinia.
Several dozen have stood the test of time exceptionally well – and give an
extraordinary impression of what Sardinian Bronze Age military architecture
looked like.
The re-assembled stone army is expected to go on display from this
summer at southern Sardinia’s Cagliari
Museum, 70 miles south-east of the
find site, Monte Prama in central Sardinia.
Many of the stone warriors are armed with bows or protected by shields –
and wear protective carved stone armour over their chests and horned stone
helmet over their heads. Some of the fighters – those believed to portray
boxers – carry shields in their left hands, held aloft over their heads. These
‘boxers’ may well have represented or embodied shield-bearers serving the high-ranking
members of the Sardinian Iron Age interred in the adjacent graves.
There were also a series of at least ten model Nuragic castles of
different designs – some single-towered and others sporting more elaborate
‘multi-tower’ fortifications.
It’s likely that the models represent the actual monumental buildings
(Bronze Age fortresses transformed into Iron Age ‘ancestral’ shrines)
associated with each buried individual’s immediate family.
The ruling elite of this part of Sardinia
may well have been a relatively tightly knit group of closely related
individuals. For scientific work carried out on the skeletal material at a
laboratory in Florence,
suggests that most of the dead individuals were from just two generations of a
single extended family.
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