New Approaches in Landscape Analysis of the Bronze Age in Central-Western Sardinia: the Area of Mogoro (Oristano – Italy)

Research on the prehistoric and proto-historic landscape in Sardinia (Italy) allows knowledge and analysis of the island’s archaeological heritage. Besides, recent studies have aimed to delineate the type of relationship that the prehistoric and proto-historic societies established with the variegated Sardinian landscape in connection with the ways of articulation and territorial appropriation, without neglecting the important and fundamental aspect of economic organisation of the territory. From this point of view, we want to analyse, as a sample-area, the region that includes the communal territory of Mogoro, in central-western Sardinia. Particularly we studied the ways of anthropisation and fruition of the landscape in proto-historic age, with the objective to reconstruct, through the study of the settlements and the relationships among them, some of the economic and social aspects of those groups of nuragic culture that enjoyed this area from the Middle Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The area of Mogoro has been intensively investigated from the half of the past century; the investigations then culminated with the stratigraphical investigation carried out beginning in 1994 near the site of Cuccurada, the main centre of an articulated territorial system including a rich network of monuments related to the nuragic civilisation, such as nuraghi, giants’ tombs and villages. In this work we present the results obtained through various research methods: geomorphological analysis, spatial analyst GIS tools (Viewshed, Cost Surface and Least-cost path analyses) and multivariate analysis (cluster and principal components analysis) that allow us to set a new hypothesis on population dynamics in this area and to individuate, among proto-historical monuments, one or more homogeneous and distinguished groups, starting from a database that results from indexing geomorphological characteristics.