Constructions of Consensus: Monument Building and the Fourth to First Millennium bc in the Central Mediterranean Islands

Abstract

In the fourth millennium bc, the central Mediterranean was a world moving away from the earlier Neolithic lifestyle towards an intense broad interconnectivity in which islanders in Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, and Pantelleria developed tangential cultural expressions typified by a prolonged period of monument building and intermittent transformation that was preceded by a slowdown from a supra-regional system of interaction. Such monumental structures played a pivotal role as political centers in these prehistoric societies; they acted as permanent images of the social order, and as such they operated as centers of consensus, promoting the dominant social discourse for as long as the prevailing hegemony was accepted. They also bonded communities through labor and other obligations, even though access into them was most likely restricted. Their decline in the first millennium bc eventually realigned these same communities into the broader historical setting.