Daily Life and Funerary Practices
The dwelling places, artisans' quarter, and necropolises of Tharros offer clues to life on the Sinis peninsula over 2500 years ago. A culture is revealed through portable artifacts and structures still sitting on the land.
Gallery
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Slide 1: Aerial view of the Tharros tophet.
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Slide 2: A sandstone tomb marker with a Punic inscription (from the southern necropolis).
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Slide 3: Ruins of an Imperial Roman necropolis in Tharros.
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Slide 4: Five clay urns used for cremation in the tophet.
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Slide 5: A sandstone stele from the Tharros tophet with a human statuette in white clay.
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Slide 6: From the artisans’ quarter, a ceramic fragment with the profile of a male face.
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Slide 7: Terracotta rings
Structures and Artifacts
Little is known about how the Punic people lived here, but some evidence shows how they dealt with religion and death. The most common funerary practice was cremation. Two necropolises already coexisted; these had simple pits dug into the sand or rock, containing the ashes of the deceased along with burial objects and personal items.
Beginning in the sixth century B.C.E., burials became more common, especially in parallelepipedal pits dug into rock or in chamber tombs with shallow entry shafts (some of them with steps). The deceased persons were laid directly on the floor or in wooden coffins and were supine, with their arms on their chests or at their sides.
These necropolises had dozens of richly decorated tombs holding gold and silver jewelry, amulets, locally crafted scarab-shaped seals, and ceramics from Greece—signs of Tharros’s busy participation in Western Mediterranean trade. Unfortunately, news of these riches led to plundering in the 1800s. The necropolises were repeatedly looted; some of the most valuable materials were carried off to antiques markets and to private and museum collections. Scholars today lament that many of these objects have been stripped of their archaeological context, making it difficult to understand their function and chronology.
In the Roman period the burial areas grew much larger; cremation and burial were common.
A tophet—an open-air sanctuary—was built here on the ruins of a Nuragic village. It was used during the Archaic Punic era through the second century B.C.E., and into the late Republican Roman period, with substantial restructurings and rearrangements over the centuries. Numerous sandstone stelae were found in this tophet, as well as thousands of cinerary urns that date back to the seventh to second centuries B.C.E.
Laboratory testing shows that many of the human bones belonged to newborns—some of them accompanied by the bones of very young sheep and goats—and that the cremation was usually done on an open-air pyre.
Adjacent to the tophet was an artisans’ quarter, where metalworkers labored for about two centuries (fifth to third century B.C.E.). Structural and chemical research shows that iron was brought here from the nearby Montiferru basin, and that the metalsmiths used sophisticated technologies such as very hot furnaces. This area is a rich source of information about iron metallurgy in the Punic period, even though few metal items remained here. What has been found from the artisans’ quarter are remarkable portraits in ceramic as well as items used by workers of other kinds (such as the terracotta rings that might be loom weights for weaving or weights for a fishing net).
Many homes in Tharros were built of sandstone blocks; in some cases the floor was made of pounded earth. Some residences had long narrow rooms; some had an interior courtyard or a courtyard out front.
Photo credits: Aerial image: Archive of the Mont’e Prama Foundation; photo: Valentino Selis. • Landscape images: Archive of the Mont'e Prama Foundation; photo: Nicola Castangia • All other images: Archive of the Mont’e Prama Foundation; photo: Nicola Castangia. Giovanni Marongiu Civic Museum of Cabras.