Altare Monte d'Accoddi

Italy

The altar is the superimposition of two phases, that of the ‘red temple,’ in the final Neolithic period (3500-2900 BC), and the following ‘terraced temple’, in the Aeneolithic period (about 2700 BC), as part of the Abealzu-Filigosa culture. In the first phase, several villages of quadrangular huts were part of a ceremonial hub, including a Domus de Janas necropolis and alongside the Santuario, in their original positions, are an elongated menhir (four and a half meters high), an enormous slab with seven holes (perhaps use to tie up victims) and boulders of spheroidal stone, one of five meters in circumference. All the rocks served a specific purpose in the sacrificial rituals. At the end of the final Neolithic period, the people of the Ozieri culture built a platform in the shape of a pyramidal trunk, with sides at the base extending 27 meters, above which stood a rectangular room with surfaces plastered and painted in ochre and traces of yellow and black. Of the sacred area remain the floor and remnants of a perimeter wall. Around 2800 BC, the structure of the ‘red temple,’ abandoned for about two centuries, was buried under a large filling of earth, stones, and limestone marlstone, in turn ‘covered’ with large blocks of stone. A new sizeable terraced pyramidal platform was built, with sides more extended than the previous one and accessible from a ramp that was forty meters long and thirteen to seven meters wide. The second sanctuary is reminiscent of the ziqqurat with an ‘open-air’ altar. The structure occupies 1,600 square meters, rising almost six meters (initially perhaps eight). Inside is an unexplored room. Probably, as in Mesopotamia, it contains the sacred bed where the ritual of regeneration of life and fertility of the earth was carried out. Around are the remains of a village, where ceramics were found almost intact. To be admired are finds safeguarded in the Sanna archaeological museum, along with a model of the altar in its earliest form. The building retained its religious function for a millennium. At its base, remains of sacred meals and objects used in propitiatory rituals were discovered. The site was abandoned at the beginning of the ancient Bronze Age (1800 BC) and occasionally reused for burials.