Ozieri, Grotta di San Michele

The cave sinks into the limestone for about eighty meters and is divided into rooms and tunnels covered with stalactites, fed by small drops of water. Partly destroyed, it was reused both as a home and as a place of worship and necropolis, as an underground burial, dug into the rock and destined for a collective grave, called 'domus de janas' (house of fairies).
From this cave, the so-called culture of “Ozieri” or “San Michele” takes its name, framed in the final Neolithic period in Sardinia, between 3,200 and 2,800 BC.
It is a basic or basic, almost popular culture that differs from the previous culture of Arzachena by origin and maintenance of the integrity of its ethnological and economic-functional origins. A culture, therefore, of a sedentary, democratic urban type, but which, having reached the provincial periphery, is transformed into a rural and peasant culture that degrades from the model of urban centralization to that of a village.
The farmers and shepherds of this culture live in double types of housing: in a natural cave or in an elementary group, which perhaps has been influenced by the environment and the economic way of life, namely shepherding. Or, a complex of huts built with various materials (stones, branches and marsh herbs), as a manifestation of community reminiscent of that of primitive cultures of the Mediterranean East, perhaps introduced by “metal diggers”.
The ceramic materials found in the cave are technically perfect, far superior to the ceramics of all subsequent cultures, with particular production and decoration of stone vases.
The design of concentric semicircles prevails. It is made with the “notched” technique, alongside which there are simpler decorative motifs such as shoppers on the edges, large dotted prints, deep commas, lunules. Ceramic decoration is also of the oriental type, imported by navigators and copper prospectors, colonizers of Sardinia, and subsequently increased by continuous commercial and cultural contacts with the various peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Ozieri's culture is also characterized by the production of flint and obsidian instruments.
Among the materials found, a finely decorated pissis with corniform spiral ornamental motifs, of Aegeo-Eastern influence, also present in the cockpit hypogeum of Corongiu-Pimentel and in the artificial groticella of Mandra Antine by Thiesi; a small female idol of the Cycladic type, in white marble, of the cruciform type without the tracing of the arms and with a rounded lower part; stone vases (steatite, calcite, chlorite), including a small cycladic idol in white marble, of the cruciform type without the tracing of the arms and with a rounded lower part; stone vases (steatite, calcite, chlorite), including a small cycladic female idol in white marble, of the cruciform type without the tracing of the arms and with a rounded lower part; stone vases (steatite, calcite, chlorite), including a small cycladic female idol in white marble, of the cruciform type without an armhole and with a rounded lower part; stone vases (steatite, calcite, chlorite), including a basket-shaped female idosmall in size, decorated with bands dotted and filled with red ochre on the outer surface, downwards; while, on the inner surface, it is decorated with semicircle patterns, with dotted bands, arranged in a crown around the hem.
The finds are kept in the National Museum “G. A. Sanna” in Sassari.

History of excavations
The excavations were carried out starting in 1914 and later in 1949.

Bibliography
P. Basoli, "La cultura di Ozieri nel territorio di Ozieri. Considerazioni preliminari", in Atti del I Convegno di Studio "La cultura di Ozieri: problematiche e nuove acquisizioni", Ozieri, Il Torchietto, 1989, pp. 113-125;
M.L. Ferrarese Ceruti, Archeologia della Sardegna preistorica e protostorica, Nuoro, Poliedro, 1997, pp. 72-72, note 8-9;
G. Lilliu, La civiltà dei Sardi. Dal Neolitico all'età dei Nuraghi, Torino, Eri, 1967, pp. 41-43, 53, 72.

How to get there
The Grotta di San Michele is located on the southern outskirts of Ozieri, in an area bounded to the north by Via San Michele, and to the south by Via Altana.