In Loculi, an archaeological dig tells four thousand years of Sardinian history

On Thursday, October 29, from 9.30 am to 1 pm, the dig on Via San Pietro in Loculi, in the province of Nuoro, opens exceptionally to visitors. It is neither a museum nor an archaeological park equipped for visits: it is an excavation in progress, with everything that entails in terms of dust, tools and unfinished work. And this is precisely its communicative strength: showing archaeology as it happens, not after it has been packaged into display cases and explanatory panels.

The investigated area covers approximately 700 square meters and yields an unusually long sequence for a single site: from the Bronze Age to the post-medieval period. Archaeologists have identified rectangular rooms that appear to have had a residential function, perimeter walls and an oven located outside the structures. These are the minimal but eloquent elements of a daily life that repeated itself, in different forms, for millennia on the same patch of land.

The excavations have proceeded with the tools and timeframes typical of field archaeological research: limited campaigns, stratigraphies read centimeter by centimeter, discoveries that accumulate slowly. The public opening initiative is promoted by the Soprintendenza Archeologia, belle arti e paesaggio for the provinces of Sassari and Nuoro together with the Municipality of Loculi, a town of modest size that suddenly finds itself the custodian of a long-duration stratigraphic document.

Cases like this deserve attention for a reason that goes beyond the single find. Inland Sardinia, often depicted through the best-known narratives of the nuraghe and the nuragic civilization, holds a number of minor sites that tell of the territory’s continuous use well beyond that specific historical phase. A site that spans, without interruption, the Bronze Age and the post-medieval period is not an isolated exception in the island’s landscape, but a clue to how much the Sardinian subsoil holds stratifications that research is only beginning to map systematically in some inland areas.

The choice to open an active dig, rather than wait for scientific publication or museum display, also responds to a logic of public communication of research that is spreading in the Italian archaeological sector: making the process visible, not just the result. For small municipalities, often lacking resources to independently develop heritage of this kind, collaboration with the soprintendenze becomes the only viable channel to turn an excavation into an occasion for shared knowledge, even if only for one morning.

It remains to be seen what the final outcome of the research in Loculi will be: whether the excavation will continue with new campaigns, whether more precise datings of the various phases of use of the area will emerge, whether the Municipality will manage to envision a permanent development of the site. For now, the October 29 appointment remains a time-limited opening — four hours, a single day — on a 700-square-meter dig that the Soprintendenza and the local administration have decided not to keep closed until the end of the works.