Nuraghi with a view: Understanding visualscapes in Nuragic Marmilla (South-Central Sardinia, Italy)

Climbing the Giara: A quantitative reassessment of movement and visibility in the Nuragic landscape of the Gesturi plateau (South-Central Sardinia, Italy)

“…The viewshed analysis has confirmed the crucial role of visibility in nuragic landscapes, as already established in previous studies [ 91 , 120 , 121 ]; at the same time, how and why this attitude towards visibility came about has been made clearer by looking at its intensity over space, and its relationship with movement (standardized density of visual control, cf. above, Nuragic location and visual control).…”

“…It then follows that, while a certain tendency towards planned defense and control over territories and resources has been detected for the nuraghi of the Giara , their interpretation as buildings optimised for defensive or territorial control purposes is here significantly weakened. Other social and symbolic goals could therefore account for the existing visual prominence attested on the Giara and more generally in Marmilla [ 120 ]: nuraghi could act as a powerful visual statement of the presence of the community, and of its right to exercise its vital activities in and around the monument itself. In light of the crowded nature of the Nuragic landscape of Marmilla, such presence would have been detectable by communities and moving people well beyond the immediate reach and neighbors of each single community, in a way that exceeded immediate concerns for safety and visual control, to be still partly detected, anyway.…”

“…First, the degree of visual control from the whole set of existing nuraghi over the Giara ’s slopes was tested, in a way independent of MPS values. While in Nuragic studies visual control is generally assumed to be directed to the access routes [ 60 , 78 ], it was here deemed useful to establish the degree by which such control could instead be a correlate of visibility per se , as already proposed in a former study of nuraghi at lower altitude in the same region of Marmilla [ 120 ]. Simple viewsheds were generated for each nuraghe on the plateau, again with radiuses ranging from 100m to 1500m.…”

“…A standard observer vertical point offset of 10m was included in the calculation, in order to simulate the average ideal height of low-complexity nuraghi, such as those found in the plateau. In GIS-based visibility studies of nuraghi, a number of different vertical offsets has been employed [ 118 , 120 , 124 , 125 , 164 ], ranging from 10 to 20m, based on monument complexity and different summary data [ 165 ]. While the low complexity of monuments in this study area seems to warrant our conservative approach, it should again be stressed that we should think of these as rule-of-thumb measures, the real impact of which–in rather coarse GIS models–can still be assessed in future research.…”