Rise and fall of Bronze Age Mediterranean societies: a new geoarchaeological and chronostratigraphic sequence of Nuragic Sardinia

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• Gian Battista Marras (British School at Rome)
• Wednesday 19 March 2025, 17:30-19:00
• Latimer Room, Clare College.

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Around the beginning of the Late Holocene (4,200 years BP) across the western Mediterranean regions, Bronze Age societies developed unique socio-economic and political complexity reflected in the construction of monumental stone architecture. New geoarchaeological and chronostratigraphic research in Sardinia, Italy, exposes for the first time the environmental underpinnings of the expansion and decline of the Nuragic Bronze Age monument-building society. These findings also highlight the role of prehistoric societies in shaping the landscape of the Mediterranean region over the Holocene. Multi-proxy geoarchaeological analyses—including soil micromorphology, XRD mineralogy, magnetic susceptibility, and geochemistry—reveal that the Bronze Age climax soil type of basaltic mesas in Sardinia was a dark Vertisol rich in primary nutrients and montmorillonite clay. These fertile soils sustained grassland ecosystems and played a key role in the distribution of early Middle Bronze Age Nuragic monuments across Sardinia’s basaltic landscapes. However, prolonged and intensified land use, particularly animal herding and agriculture, to support monument construction led to soil erosion and, ultimately, the replacement of deep, nutrient-rich Vertisol cover with a thin, oxidised and vertic Cambisol one. These processes resulted in a significant increase in sediment supply in the catchment east of the mesa, causing a new major phase of alluviation in the valley bottoms during the Late Holocene. These landscape changes triggered a socio-environmental crisis marked by the abandonment of the mesa at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, hence excluding the influence of a climate change in causing the local societal collapse.

This talk is part of the Quaternary Discussion Group (QDG) series.

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