Torralba, Sardinia, Italy. Close to a group of nuraghes near the largest one, Santu Antine, an archeologist, Augusto Mulas, looks at the sky and has an idea: may these monuments represent the famous open star cluster M45, better known as the Pleiades? What are nuraghes? They are tower-shaped prehistoric monuments from the Neolithic and Bronze Age, and they can be found everywhere on the island, from the coast to the mountainside, because Sardinia has an exceptional concentration of these monuments. Over 8000 towers and many other structures as dolmens, standing stones, cromlechs, sacred wells, tombs, megaron temples. Built with dry-stone techniques, some of them are quite complex and can reach considerable heights, up to almost 30 meter, only surpassed by the pyramids of Egypt at the time, but their use and role has been hotly debated and is still controversial. They were proven to be frequented well into the Roman era as places of worship and recent studies have demonstrated that many nuraghes were astronomically oriented towards seasonal events such as solstices and equinoxes. Lunar phases were likely observed from these characteristic towers, and particular alignments between nuraghes have also been detected with such a precision that leaves no doubts that these were intentional. In the last decades, much literature has been published on these subjectsalso by Augusto Mulas and Marco Sanna, an engineer, who try together to assess the plausibility of the idea that this group of nuraghes near Santu Antine in Torralba was in fact designed to represent the Pleiades. Inside Nuraghe Santu Antine, Torralba, Sardinia, Italy. Photo by Gabriella Bernardi While the first part of the book is devoted to more archaeological analysis, in the second part Sanna conducted a probabilistic analysis that supports this hypothesis, but the reader should not be frightened by the mathematics in there, because the whole process is described in very clear and concise way for the uninitiated. Leggi l'articolo completo