Printed July 28, 2022
15 min be taught
From atop Menorca’s megalithic stone towers, watchers would procure witnessed the tides of history roll across the island with the successive waves of the ragged Mediterranean superpowers—the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans.
But long earlier than those heavyweights stepped ashore, the island’s humble pioneers carved out a life on the windswept, largely treeless landscape. Those towers, called talayots, were constructed from the raw arena subject those first inhabitants and their descendants found in abundance—blocks of limestone. By simply making create with what they had, the Menorcans created a legacy advise in stone.
To most, Spain’s Balearic Islands would possibly perhaps perhaps very properly be higher known for the jet-advise shoreline destinations of Ibiza and Mallorca. But mild Menorca, the easternmost link within the chain, combines that natural elegance with a clear cherish trove—the archipelago’s ideally suited repository of ragged structure. Interior these towers and varied “cyclopean” constructions—made from unhewn, mortarless stones—lies an island history knit together over a millennium, leaving its ticket on the Menorcan landscape and identity.
The earliest indicators of this distinctive structure are tied to burial mounds that doubtlessly date to 2000 B.C. Those easy megalithic tombs, or dolmens, at final gave manner to the principle cyclopean constructions—dwellings fashioned love upside-down ship hulls called navetas—around 1600 B.C. Four hundred years later, talayots, derived from the Arabic talaya (“watchtower”), sprouted up and lent their name to the Talayotic island culture that created them.
The in vogue upward thrust of these intelligent truncated cones coincided with the expansion of native communities. Ranging from a talayot heart, a settlement gradually fanned out, and over time fresh building designs appeared: taula shrines that to a pair evoke the Stonehenge pillars, circular dwellings, and big partitions.
(Read about Stone Age megalithic monuments in Big Britain.)
As of late these remnants of the Talayotic Menorcan culture are a candidate for UNESCO’s World Heritage Checklist, a designation of world cultural tag. (The choice had been scheduled for a June meeting of the World Heritage Committee in Russia but has been postponed because of the the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)
Architectural legacy
Consultants divide this fruitful culture that persevered for just about 2,000 years into four sessions, its long term ending in 123 B.C., the yr a Roman immediate conquered the island along with Mallorca and began to colonize them. It modified the route of Menorca’s history, but its structure remained, and in some instances became as soon as feeble even up till the Islamic interval, which started within the 10th century.
The buildings stand out no longer only for their diversity but also since the island has with out a doubt one of the essential realm’s very top concentrations of archaeological sites, ranging from the foundation blocks of limited dwellings to properly-preserved village centers. In an house of fair 270 sq. miles, Menorca has an total of 1,574 inventoried spots.
The island “is house to 9 percent of Spain’s Assets of Cultural Curiosity, with fair 0.13 percent of its land,” per Margarita Orfila, an archaeology professor who co-authored the World Heritage software program. Inclusion within the checklist would elevate the island’s international profile, toughen conservation measures, promote fresh analysis, and foster tourism beyond the busy summer season season.
With their sheer numbers, the icons are also omnipresent. “Within the comfort of the realm,” Orfila points out, “most similar archaeological landscapes are in nationwide parks or reserves, where there would possibly perhaps be shrimp human exercise, and so that they aren’t prominent.”
But all the draw by strategy of Menorca, and namely within the 9 proposed areas for designation, there would possibly perhaps be “an distinctive residing archaeological landscape, which is entirely integrated with day to day life in 21st-century Menorca.” The extensive stones stand among fields of vegetation and grazing cows and sheep, apparently murmuring ragged tales in regards to the island’s first inhabitants.
Island identities
But who were they? “They came from the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula or the house [in today’s France] around the Gulf of Lion,” suggests Joaquim Pons, an archaeology specialist at the Island Council’s Division of Tradition. The conclusion is per two elements: prevailing winds and currents would procure carried boats to the islands, and Menorca’s burial sites are oriented in opposition to the sunset—the identical as those around the Gulf of Lion, whereas within the comfort of the Mediterranean they’d face atomize of day.
“They reached the flit of Menorca within the 2nd half of the third millennium B.C. aboard rudimentary boats, along with some domesticated animals and classic utensils,” he adds. “Perchance they determined to undertake the kind of bad crawl resulting from they were fleeing opposed cases on the mainland.”
The unsafe sea voyage took them to a rocky and largely unfertile land with restricted resources where a no longer easy life awaited them. Consistent with reviews of graves using carbon dating and DNA prognosis, half of the younger of us below five years broken-down died of disease, and despite the undeniable truth that grownup life expectancy would possibly perhaps perhaps perhaps attain 50 years, it most continuously did no longer exceed 25. Those identical reviews revealed a dietary surprise: despite being surrounded by the ocean, they consumed no fish or seafood, as a change relying on meat, grains, and legumes.
With settlements clustered inland and the shoreline reserved for burials—which gradually moved nearer to the ocean and at final into coastal cliffs—it became as soon as as if the ocean became as soon as sacred, an infinite expanse that merged with the sky in a problem akin to the afterlife.
The first settlers buried their stupid collectively in hypogea, caves dug into the rocky terrain, or in dolmens, doubtlessly following the traditions from their ancestral fatherland. The grave goods and using collective burials imply a society tha