The nuraghes and the Pleiades
An extraordinary hypothesis on the layout of a group of Bronze Age monuments in Sardinia.
Torralba, Sardinia, Italy.
Close to a group of nuraghes near the largest one, Santu Antine, an archeologist, Augusto Mulas, looks at the sky and has an idea: may these monuments represent the famous open star cluster M45, better known as the Pleiades?
What are nuraghes?
They are tower-shaped prehistoric monuments from the Neolithic and Bronze Age, and they can be found everywhere on the island, from the coast to the mountainside, because Sardinia has an exceptional concentration of these monuments. Over 8000 towers and many other structures as dolmens, standing stones, cromlechs, sacred wells, tombs, megaron temples.
Built with dry-stone techniques, some of them are quite complex and can reach considerable heights, up to almost 30 meter, only surpassed by the pyramids of Egypt at the time, but their use and role has been hotly debated and is still controversial.
They were proven to be frequented well into the Roman era as places of worship and recent studies have demonstrated that many nuraghes were astronomically oriented towards seasonal events such as solstices and equinoxes.
