Crisis and Recovery: The Cost of Sustainable Development in Nuragic Sardinia NICOLA IALONGO Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany Crises are thresholds in human history, often marking substantial transformations in societies. Crises, however, are not instants in time. They start, unfold, and develop in a process that is often traumatic for social systems, with outcomes ranging from catastrophe to complete recovery. In this article, catastrophic models are employed to understand a non-catastrophic outcome: the complete recovery that nuragic Sardinia experienced after a long crisis, caused in the first place by unsustainable strategies of territorial expansion. Starting from the premises of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, it is argued that the transform- ation of nuragic society was the best way of avoiding the constraints that the social structure imposed on the perspective of a sustainable growth. The study is based on a geostatistical analysis of a large sample of settlements, and it attempts to quantify population growth ratios for the Late Bronze Age. Keywords: Late Bronze Age, nuragic, crisis, catastrophe, recovery, sustainable growth INTRODUCTION On 9 March 2016, the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China ratified the Paris Agreement on climate change, committing to limiting greenhouse gas emission. The news was covered with enthusiasm by most media, but a large part still received it with scepti- cism or even open opposition: the reduction of oil and coal consumption imposes high costs in the short run, and the long-term benefits are not universally accepted. In Western countries, the arguments against the limitation of gas emissions range from concern about immediate costs to denying the very existence of a global warming process. The arena of public opinion clearly plays a major role, since different stances on climate-improving policies are usually prominent subjects in election programmes, in one way or another. In short, the ability to foresee a catastrophe and to deploy tech- nical solutions is not enough to prompt action: the transformation of production strategies bears high short-term costs, and the conflicting interests of heterogeneous socio-economic groups lead to contrasting interpretations of the catastrophe itself and of its possible solutions, hence fuelling socio-political conflict. Whether the catastrophe is imminent or not is not the point here; taking one’s cue from contemporary, contingent problems, however, can sometimes raise questions that can be addressed in the archaeological field. What this article is concerned with is the transformative process that links crisis and recovery, how it unfolds, and what kind of socio-political tensions are expected to emerge, once the contingency of the catastrophe is universally European Journal of Archaeology 21 (1) 2018, 18–38 © European Association of Archaeologists 2017 doi:10.1017/eaa.2017.20 Manuscript received 16 October 2016, accepted 28 March 2017, revised 14 March 2017 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/eaa.2017.20 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. SUB Gottingen, on 07 Mar 2018 at 12:36:08, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at