Beginning with the first settlements in the Paleolithic, and ending with the Roman period, this book brings together in a single volume the latest research in Sardinian studies. This Festschrift includes discussions over the nature of Paleolithic settlement on Sardinia, and presents new data on Neolithic chronology, architecture, religion, settlement patterns and metallurgy. The relations between Phoenician, Punic, Greek and Roman colonists and the indigenous Sards in the Iron Age are also treated.

Balanced between the Aegean and West Mediterranean worlds, Sardinia offers a perfect laboratory for the investigation of interaction between societies from the Palaeolithic to Roman period. This work has, however, been hampered in the past by incompatible chronologies, so the 46 papers in this volume (originated at an international congress held at Tufts University in 1995) form an important stepping stone for future research. Twelve papers in Italian take a stylistic approach, using architecture, sculpture and (for the Chalcolithic). The English-language papers discuss radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology, obsidian and other scientific approaches to dating. As the title of the book suggests, Aegean chronologies benefit as much as the West Mediterranean from the results presented here.

With one of the richest archaeological records and most complicated histories in the Mediterranean, Sardinia provides an important laboratory for studying the interaction of indigenous societies and outside forces in a partly isolated geographical context. Stephen L. Dyson and Robert J. Rowland, Jr. use both material culture and written documents to reconstruct the social and economic processes of an island society that showed both cultural creativity and continuity but responded to invasions from the Phoenicians through the Romans to the Aragonese. This first accessible reconstruction of island archaeology provides a balanced picture of the sweep of Sardinian history.

The Archaeology of Nuragic Sardinia is a comprehensive synthesis of evidence bearing on current understandings of Sardinian prehistory from the 23rd through the 8th centuries BC. It is a study of the material traces left by those insular societies known famously for their unique megalithic 'Giants' tombs and intricate water-temples, as well as for the remarkable cyclopean edifices or nuraghi for which this singular 'civilization' takes its name. Following introductory discussions of the history of Nuragic research up to the present, as well as the island's natural setting, individual chapters are given over to detailed examinations of findings on chronology, settlement, subsistence, industries, trade, external relations and cult practices for successive chronological periods from the Early Bronze Age through the Early Iron Age. For each period, issues of interpretation are addressed with regard to what might be reasonably inferred about Nuragic social institutions, normative codes, cognitive orientations, identity formations, cultural hybridity and entanglements, and the role of indigenous and exogenous factors in cultural continuity and discontinuity. While the focus throughout is on the Sardinian record, due consideration is also paid to potentially related developments on the neighboring island of Corsica. A postscript features a glimpse of life at the great Iron Age sanctuary of Santa Vittoria di Serri as imagined by the late 'father of Sardinian archaeology' Giovanni Lilliu.