Sardinia’s nuraghi: Four millennia of becoming

The purpose of this paper is to examine the social impact of the enduring presence of the nuraghi, Sardinia's monumental Bronze Age towers. From later prehistory through the modern era, the towers have featured prominently in both the social and environmental landscapes of the island. Their enduring importance has been attributed to cultural conservatism or functionalist motivations. Instead this paper considers the sustained social impact of the nuraghi as an ongoing and disjointed process of identity formation, shifting the focus away from the tower's origins and on to the ongoing repercussions of their presence. While the premise of this paper is a pragmatist-inspired epistemology, its theme is what Edward Soja (1985) has called ‘the spatiality of social life’, the complex interplay between space and society, and the manner in which conceptions of each are constituted by the other.