Black gold

The Sardinia is, with some massifs of the Alps and the Calabrian Apennines, the oldest land in Italy: it exists almost alone in the primary era (570-225 million years); completely emerged in the Tertiary era (65-2 million years ago), until the Quaternary (from 2 million years ago) it was only one block with Corsica. It abounds in the black gold of the Neolithic era: obsidian.

Neolithic black gold: obsidian

It is sometimes assumed that the two islands would be the remains of a vast continent (Atlantis? Tyrrhenides?) of the secondary era, engulfed in the tertiary era; some fossils found in Sardinia (the dwarf elephant common to the Mediterranean islands, or the macaque also found in Spain and Gibraltar) and a living animal (the common mouflon with Corsica, Crete and Cyprus) suggest that the Mediterranean may have been a region of large and small lakes between which animals roamed freely.

We see on map 2 that the plain of Campidano (south-west) corresponds to a ditch opened in the Secondary and gradually filled in by sediments which leave numerous ponds; it is the richest region (agriculture, mines, saltworks, fishing).

 

We can think that, about 20 million years ago, there would have been a single "southern Provençal" block, before the appearance of the current Mediterranean, and that Corsica and Sardinia would have gradually separated of the block and separated like two arms of a compass with Genoa as the axis of rotation. The evidence is abundant, for example, identical rocks and volcanic flows in the Maures, L'Esterel, Corsica and Sardinia.

It seems that the fauna, flora and the human type Sardinians have been stable (ox, dog, wild boar, fox, mouflon, deer still existing, while small crocodiles, elephants, bears, monkeys ... are only found in the fossil state) and have kept the same characteristics since the origins , including their low waist: permanence explained by the fact that nature and the soil – harsh and arid – could not be modified by man and that therefore man and nature have remained unchanged throughout history.

It was not until the 1960s of our century that agriculture was able to gain new ground. Sardinia is the second Mediterranean island in area (24,089 km2, 7.5% of physical Italy); its geographical location makes it a region of transition, a meeting of Italian, Iberian and African landscapes, at the crossroads of the important longitudinal route between the western and eastern basins of the Mediterranean, in a strategic and military position which made it converge and merge very different cultural and ethnic elements, in a configuration that still marks the island and makes it a kind of " natural museum for southern european ethnography (G. Lilliu).

the old Ichnusa (of iknos = sole of the foot) or Sandaliòtis  Where Sardo  of the Greeks, who compared it to a human footprint (hence the legend later Christian who saw there a trace of the foot of God during the creation of the world), is the most distant island of all the coasts. The configuration of its 1896 km of coastline contributes paradoxically to isolating it from the main currents of the main Mediterranean civilizations: rocky for 3/4, and made up of beaches bordered by dunes, with few natural ports, with the exception of Cagliari, turned south to Africa.

The contour is more varied to the South and West, where the isobath (line of equal depth) is maintained regularly at 200 m. about 20m. from the shore, while the east coast has jumps of 1,000 m. less than 15 km away, which explains why the first human presences are denser in the West and South, the interior of which also includes ponds or lagoons and areas of more fertile plains.

The coasts therefore did not favor a colonization and a settlement of Sardinia of the type of those experienced by Sicily and Great Britain.Greece, but occupations aimed at simple politico-military domination and exploitation of the agricultural and mining wealth of Campidano. The interior of the island is not more favourable: the primitive continental granite massif was gradually fragmented by successive fractures which fragmented the landscape into a series of mountains separated by pits or conches filled by trachytic effusions (lavas, and presence of obsidian) then by limestone or marly deposits.

Thus the 100 km pit which constitutes the Campidano is filled with quaternary alluvium. This formation draws a set of about fifteen old massifs with a rounded surface, separated by high plateaus and plains corresponding to lines of tectonic fractures.

This morphology of the island favored the development of small ethnic units with a cantonal character, inside the village, even of clans or family groups living in the natural borders of the mountains in a multiplicity of cultural environments without political and moral cohesion. , which facilitated the action of invaders at all times.

These small units preferably settled, during the nuragic period, between 500 and 600 meters and 25-30 km from the sea, on the plateaus from where they could dominate and monitor the environment. Only the pre-nuragic cultures had preferred the alluvial plains and the edges of the rivers or the karstic caves at less than 600 m. and less than 25 km from the sea.

This culture of the high plateau, not very suitable for agriculture (which corresponds to the river and plain civilizations = 1/5 of the surface of the island) favors on the other hand the development of the breeding and a warlike pastoral civilization, on land favorable to grass and maquis, garrigue, moor or pre-desert steppe, the diversity of which led to a practice of transhumance and pastoral nomadism in the interior lands unsuitable for agriculture. Even in the plains and hilly areas, unlike the great civilizations of Greece and the Middle East, agricultural civilization never reached the stage of urban civilization, except on the coasts.

Another constitutive element of Sardinian culture is the richness of the subsoil in minerals which was undoubtedly one of the main causes of the arrival of man on the island, in search of obsidian (“ black gold » of Antiquity) used from the Stone Age to the Iron Age to make weapons and tools. Later metals were exploited: silver, lead, copper from the regions most open to the sea (Campidano) and which therefore easily attracted navigators.

It is from this presence of mines that came the industrial character of the Nuragic civilization and the vocation to war which characterized these peoples of shepherds.