“The interior of Sardinia is full of dolmens…”
This is pretty much the only thing I knew about the place before I went there to help build a race. Hot. Beachy. Dolmens.
On my one half day down before I leave here I decided to head to the nearest place of ancient significance. Su Nuraxi. It’s about 17 thousand years old. People mostly just thought it was a hill, like the one that carries Acquafredda castle. I think in the fifties somebody figured out that there were complicated man made structures long buried under the earth of this hill. They began to excavate. They quickly realised it was significant enough to give it UNESCO World Heritage status. They carved the whole thing out again.
It’s old enough that every attempt to make sense of what it was for is going to be guesswork, but people were using it and they put thought into building it.
I didn’t have long there, and you have to go with a tour guide. They won’t let you go unaccompanied. I shelled out and struck off with the first available tour, which happened to be in Italian. He kept talking about defence. We seem to understand everything through our warlike prism. I had a feeling that yes, defence was part of this story but only a small part. Sure, you’re a small organised farming community, so you have food and stuff, and there are some less thoughtful nomadic types out there that have found that a good way of getting stuff is by killing organised farming communities. You need to make sure it’s not worth their while trying to kill you so they can eat your goat. So… you will have some defence – you’ll have to. The more peaceful and well fed your civilisation looks, the tastier it looks from the outside, which is why I will always maintain that searching for extra terrestrial life is madness. They must have done things together for a long time before enough short term thinkers swarmed over what they had built, ate all the goat, understood nothing of how it all worked, and left it to be buried.
We had a bit of time in the structure. At its heart there are a series of underground chambers organised around an open central shaft. Most of it is built of black basalt. It’s pretty stable – the Sardinians have no idea what they were used for, and neither does the guide or Wikipedia. I managed to be alone for a few moments in the deepest one. I improvised a ritual. Why not? A bit of sound. Some intention. A flash of something. The deep old ones there haven’t had so much of that for a long time. Maybe they were grateful. Mostly people have just chucked money through a grate into a well, asking for things through wishing. I didn’t ask for anything, I just did some random shit.
Now I’m in a plane. I’m stuck in the middle and my legs are too long. We land in twenty minutes. Athens ho! Not for long though.
AlBarclay 