Sardinia Has 800 Giants' Tombs, and Not One Was Built for a Giant

Sardinia is dotted with about 800 "giants' tombs", and not one of them was built for a giant. That was the count of known sites in a 2003 survey cited by the region's Sardegna Virtual Archaeology project. These Bronze Age monuments were collective graves where Nuragic communities laid their dead together, over generations, between roughly 1600 and 1150 BC.

The name comes from folklore, not from bones. Faced with granite slabs taller than a person and burial chambers around 10 meters long, Sardinians long assumed only enormous beings could have been buried inside. The official tourism site of the Sardinia region puts it plainly: according to legend, huge beings used the tombs, but in reality they were collective burial places. Archaeologists kept the popular label anyway.

Seen from above, a typical giants' tomb looks like a bull's head. A long, narrow chamber ends in a rounded back, and the front opens into two curved wings of stone. Those wings form the exedra, a semicircular courtyard that experts interpret as a ceremonial space where rites for the dead took place in front of the grave.

At the center of the facade, the oldest type has a stele: a single upright slab with an arched top and a tiny opening at its base. The best preserved example is at S'Ena 'e Thomes, near Dorgali. Its granite stele is almost 4 meters tall and weighs about seven tonnes. Behind it runs an 11-meter burial corridor roofed with flat slabs, and, unusually, the tomb faces south rather than east.

That little door is far too small for anyone to crawl through. According to La Sardegna verso l'UNESCO, these portals probably had a symbolic meaning, a passage between the living and the dead. When a new body had to go in, the builders reached the chamber by temporarily removing one or more of the stone slabs that covered it.

The tallest stele known stands at Coddu Vecchju, near Arzachena in the north of the island. The Arzachena municipality gives its height as 4.04 meters, built from two granite blocks set one on top of the other and framed by a carved border. The tomb behind it began as an older gallery grave and was later remodeled with the curved facade.

Each of these chambers could hold a crowd. Archaeologist Paolo Melis, quoted by the same UNESCO candidacy project, estimates that a single tomb could contain dozens, if not hundreds, of individuals. At S'Ena 'e Thomes, the few objects found with the dead showed no obvious signs of rank, which suggests a community that buried its members side by side.

Fashions changed over time. In north-central Sardinia, during the Middle Bronze Age (around 1400 to 1300 BC), the slab-and-stele design gave way to tombs built of carefully cut stone blocks, with a lintel over the entrance instead of a stele. Across the second and first millennia BC, as researcher Anna Depalmas has described, Sardinian society gradually moved from these shared tombs toward individual burials.

Most of these sites are concentrated in the central and western parts of the island, between the Gulf of Orosei and southern Planargia, and many can be visited on foot through Mediterranean scrub. The giants, it turns out, were the people who moved seven-tonne slabs to honor their dead.

Sources: Sardegna Virtual Archaeology, Regione Sardegna; SardegnaTurismo; La Sardegna verso l'UNESCO; Comune di Arzachena; Depalmas, From collective tombs to individual burials. Cover: Giants' tomb of S'Ena 'e Thomes, Dorgali, by gaspart.