Nuraghe Oes

Eight hundred metres from the great fortress of Santu Antine, the nuraghe Oes is a Bronze Age tower whose chambers were once split into three rooms by wooden floors resting on ledges cut into the basalt masonry — a rare construction technique in Nuragic architecture.

Why it matters

Most nuraghi announce their engineering in stone: corbelled tholos vaults, ring corridors, ramparts. Oes makes its claim with timber. The main tower and a secondary tower each contained a single chamber divided into three storeys by wooden floors carried on ledges — riseghe — fixed through holes cut into the walls, an unusual construction feature. The compound probably dates to the Middle and Recent Bronze Age — a building horizon around the fourteenth century BCE — with use continuing until the Iron Age opened in the ninth century BCE. Nor is it a solitary tower: around the keep stretch a bilobed bastion, a sacred enclosure with a megaron temple, traces of a giants' tomb, a settlement of huts and defensive walls — a planned ritual and residential compound on the north-east slope of Campu giavesu. Giovanni Lilliu, the founding figure of Sardinian archaeology, read the masonry as showing two building phases, an older keep and a later annexe.

What to notice

The keep has twenty-nine stone courses and a truncated-cone profile. The bastion pressed against it is bilobed — a perimeter of fifty metres on two levels with two entrances — enclosing a courtyard and two secondary towers, one of them still well preserved; the whole complex covers about 425 square metres. In the sacred area, find the roughly hexagonal enclosure — the temenos — and the megaron temple beside it; near the nuraghe, a giant's tomb has left its stele lying on the ground. Between sanctuary and tower, twenty stones driven knife-edge into the earth recall a megalithic circle. Look for the surviving wall runs with guard towers, a second wall alignment running south to north, and terracing to the south-east that hints at further defensive curtains. Inside, the spiral stair, lamp niches and storage niche remain visible, though some chambers are partly filled by collapsed stone and earth.

Context and history

Nuraghe Oes stands in the Valle dei Nuraghi, close to the riu Mannu and about eight hundred metres from Santu Antine. The complex is generally dated from the Middle and Recent Bronze Age, with use continuing into the Iron Age. Lilliu's observation of clear construction differences between the older keep and the late-annexed body gives the complex a legible biography of growth.