The Etruscan World (Routledge Worlds)

• Fulvia Lo Schiavo –

does not seem inconvenient to have preserved them for many centuries after the period of
manufacture, which was perhaps followed by reproductions in clay.
The 100 or so small reproductions of bronze boats, of various forms and dimensions, but
all ending with an animal head at the prow, mostly found in Sardinia and in small numbers
in Etruria and Latium as well, constitute incontrovertible evidence of how the Nuragic
peoples, in reality or by way of symbol, had knowledge of the sea and of navigation.

CONCLUSION

This is the scenario into which the Phoenicians arrive and in a short time take hold of
the southern trade routes from the Levantine coasts to the Atlantic, evidently following
preceding maritime enterprises and, as far as Sardinia is concerned, prospecting all
the island including the east coast, establishing a joint-venture trade in Sant’Imbenia,
probably attracted by the rich Calabona copper mines (Giardino, Lo Schiavo 2007), but
soon discovering the better option of the wine trade, in amphoras produced on the spot,
shaped according to their Levantine models, foreign to Nuragic Sardinia, and (fi nally)
settling in south-west “Shardana” land; it appears clearly that they were following a path
known to them or/and familiar to their next of kin.
The coming of the age of Iron, as was said many years ago, is not only a chronological
boundary, but an epochal change, due to strictly interconnected metallurgical,
technological, economical and social changes. Things are not the same at the end of the
Final Bronze Age in Sardinia, but the Nuragic Heritage had a fundamental role to play
in Tyrrhenian Peninsular Italy, throughout the Iron Age and all through the Phoenician
material and cultural infl uence.

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