A comparative study of megalithic monuments in Sardinia and beyond

We present a reappraisal of previous works on the megalithic structures of Sardinia together with new data collected in the last years for new monuments. In total we analysed more than 1500 megalithic structures in the island. We have performed two statistical cluster analyses on these data: first we use a Group analysis to search for similar clusters of orientation through a dendrogram; secondly we try to group the orientations according with the shape of the orientation distribution by a K-means test. We confirm the existence of differences between the southern and northern halves of Sardinia since the appearance of dolmens. We then compare the orientation of these groups in Sardinia with other groups of contemporaneous megalithic monuments in the central Mediterranean basin. The results of these analyses indicate that the differences observed between the North and South of Sardinia could be related to differences in the orientation customs in the North and South shores of the Western Mediterranean. In this sense we envisage Sardinia as a carrefour for orientation customs.