The surrounding village, of 200 or 300 huts, separated by narrow labyrinthine passages, housed the troops; the chief lived in the tower. The village, hard-hit when the Carthaginians sacked it late in the sixth century B.C., survived in decadence till the late first century B.C. The typical oval or rectangular plan of an early Su Nuraxi village hut resembles that of the Bronze Age in Sicily or Cyprus. One contained a pit for votive offerings. Sixty round huts, with lower courses in stone, have been dated in Upper Nuragic I. They would have been roofed, like shepherd huts in Sardinia to this day, with logs and branches weighted by stones. One larger circle has seats around its inner perimeter. It was equipped with shelves, a niche, a stone basin, and a sacred stone (a model of a _nuraghe_). Lilliu thinks this must have been the warriors’ council chamber. Su Nuraxi yielded artifacts in stone, terracotta, bronze, iron, lead, and amber, the latter showing connections with trade routes to the Baltic. Lilliu found axes, millstones, pestles, and bronze votive statuettes. Pottery and _fibulae_ (humble safety-pins, whose shapes, varying from age to age, are a help in dating) suggest connections with Phoenicia--via Carthage--and Etruria, whose rich and, in certain respects, mysterious culture is discussed in the next chapter. In a later phase, after the Carthaginian invasion, the huts have fan-shaped rooms, each devoted to a specialized occupation, baking, oil-pressing, stone-tool making. A pair of stone boot-trees, or shoe-lasts, presumably from a cobbler’s shop, was one of the more curious finds. Gewgaws in glass paste, poor, decadent, commercialized, but traditional in design, testify to the material and aesthetic poverty of this period. Only the last phase yielded tombs, but a huge stele with a curved top may have marked the entrance to what the peasants call a Giant’s Grave, a Stone Age slab-edged tomb, forming a corridor sometimes as much as twenty yards along, from which two wings branch off to form a semicircular approach. This scientific dig provides a fixed foundation for future research into earlier ages on Sardinia. Lilliu is understandably excited about the “dynamic spirit” revealed by the creators of this amazingly early massiveness, but like all massiveness, whether of pyramid, ziggurat, or Roman Imperial palace, it undoubtedly justifies the unhappy inference that with all this grandeur went autocracy. * * * * *