Nuraghe Attentu
Nuraghe Attentu, whose name in Sardinian language means wormwood, is inside the first part of the town, in the area named Iscala de chessa.
It is a complex nuraghe: has a main round tower, and two secondary smaller towers, attached between them by a straight stone wall which delimits an uncovered garden (Fiori, 1966).
In this nuraghe they found marks that make us think it was inhabited in Punic and Roman age, marks mainly noticeable through several fragments of bones, which shows us they kept on living till old age, too.
In 1874, nuraghe Attentu was studied by the archaeologist Giovanni Spano, who performed on it the first stratigraphic excavations in Sardinia ever.
He dug the outer part, down to the depth of four metres, finding fragments of Roman crockery. In the upper part, in front of the nuraghe building, he found the 75 cm thick wall of a roman house, presumably poor, because they discovered nothing but crockery and pots in it. Thus he dug the floor until he got to the “primitive layer” underneath, where he found ox and ram bones, fragments of plain crockery and even a hand-worked oil lamp (Fiori, 1966).
In the years preceding his excavations, several things coming from different ages were discovered: in 1854, during the opening of the borough street, they found a walled burial and some coins (Spano, 1859); in 1863, a terracotta capital, Roman and Punic coins and column fragments, spread in the surrounding area; in 1872, a coin probably coming from Gallio Luparco’s 25 b. C. triumvirate (Fiori, 1966).
More recently, in 1928, an ancient sword was found, which is kept in Sanna Museum in Sassari and represents a unicum within the framework of Sardinian bronze-works, probably come to Sardinia from northern Italy (Moravetti, 1979).
In the fifties of the twentieth century, mister Giuseppe Canu from Ploaghe found a deep grave covered with big boulders, which had inside a terracotta jar, and many weapons: a cannon-shaped lance point, a double-pointed pick, a bronze double-bladed axe, a Sardinian-Punic coin and a Roman one (Fiori, 1966). Finally in 1966, professor Lillina Fiori, near the nuraghe, found a fragment of Roman pot with ICIN written on it (Fiori, 1966).