Grotta di San Michele, Ozieri

The cave of St. Michael of Ozieri, near the town, sinks into the limestone for about eighty meters and is made up of rooms and tunnels covered with stalactites, fed by small drops of water. Partly destroyed, it was reused both as a dwelling and as a place of worship and necropolis, as an underground burial, carved into the rock and intended as a collective tomb, called “domus de janas” (fairy house). This cave gives its name to the so-called “Ozieri” or “San Michele” culture, framed in the late Neolithic in Sardinia, between 3200 and 2800 BC. The ceramic materials found in the cave are technically perfect, clearly superior to the ceramics of all subsequent cultures, with particular production and decoration of stone vessels mainly with concentric semicircle designs. The excavations, carried out in 1914 and 1949, brought to light a remarkable quantity of artifacts now preserved in the National Museum “G.A. Sanna” of Sassari.