Blurb:

The book tackles the rise of public sanctuaries in Sardinia as a culture-historical problem, and attempts to frame it within a structural perspective. Public spaces arise in Sardinia around 950 BC, which apparently played a major role in transforming social ties, from kinship-based social organization into active political strategies. The Sardinian context, particularly “visible” in material terms, is argued to hold explicative potential for contemporary (yet less visible) processes active in the Western Mediterranean framework, which eventually lead to the formation of proto-state entities.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Nuragic sanctuaries were sites of outstanding supralocal importance, but also that they weren’t in the sense that a classic chiefdom model would imply. Sanctuaries were not proper “seats of power”, actual military and economic prerogatives being concentrated in several surrounding petty chiefdoms. Sanctuaries were in fact the institutionalized expression of a shared decisional organization and, as such, existing by virtue of their very institutional function.