di Arianna Carta
Spring 1961. In the Lanaittu Valley, beneath Mount Gutturgios, a group of speleologists from the Nuorese Caves Group climbs a rock face to a small cave in the Dorgali area. At the end of a narrow tunnel, they find what they weren't looking for: a nearly complete human skeleton, buried in the earth for nearly four thousand years.
They called her Sisaia. The name comes from the local dialect and, curiously, originated in the masculine form: Sisaiu, the ancestor of ancestors. For twelve years, it remained masculine in the documentation: the feminine form only appeared in print in 1974, after osteological confirmation.
The sex, however, was correctly indicated from the beginning, but in a way that is worth examining. In the 1963 catalog, the archaeologist declares he lacks sufficient anatomical knowledge to determine it based on the pelvic bones, and deduces it from the presence of the millstone in the grave goods. Grinding is a woman's job, therefore she is a woman. Osteology, later, will prove him right: but for reasons that have nothing to do with the millstone. An assumption that turns out to be correct doesn't cease to be an assumption: it simply becomes more difficult to see. Today, Sisaia is one of the best-known skeletons from Sardinian prehistory: Bonnanaro culture, Early Bronze Age, around 1850 BC. And it is also, perhaps, the most instructive case of how a burial can become a mirror: we look at the bones and see ourselves reflected.
What the bones say
Let's start with what is documented. The reference scientific sources are the study by Maria Luisa Ferrarese Ceruti and Franco Germanà, published in 1978, and revisited by Germanà in 1995. In 2014, a reconstruction of Sisaia's face, published by Ornella Becheroni, brought the case back to public attention. Sisaia was an adult woman. Her skeleton shows multiple fractures and, most importantly, cranial trepanation. And this is where the data becomes truly extraordinary, but not in the sense usually portrayed. The bony margin of the trepanation shows clear signs of healing: Sisaia survived the operation—for months, perhaps years. The cause of her death, Germanà writes in the anthropological note, remains unknown and cannot be attributed to either the fractures or the trepanation.[1].
The fractures, the analysis continues, are "defense" injuries, perhaps attributable to a single trauma. Whether it was a blow or a fall, the bones do not reveal. And the body's position, half-crouched, is explicitly traced to a prosaic cause: the narrowness of the burial passage; the feet were facing the exit. Around the body, other concrete details. The expedition's plant expert identified plant remains attributable to Anagyris foetida, perhaps a bed. And excavation tests conducted by Ferrarese Ceruti in 1976 documented that the cave had already hosted at least one previous burial, also from the Bonnanaro period (ceramic fragments, human remains not related to the main skeleton, a curved handle on the terrace).
Yet, in the same pages, there's also a contrasting element: the primary deposition, that is, the entire body left to decompose where it was placed, is defined as an absolutely exceptional event for this cultural context. In the Early Bronze Age of Sardinia, the dead were typically buried together, and later, in collective burials.
Let us keep both points in mind, because together they say something precise and subtle: the place was not reserved for her, the way in which she was placed there was.
The projection gallery
Because over the decades, layer after layer of stories has been deposited on these bones. Sisaia was, depending on the narrator: a shaman, guardian of archaic powers; a healer, repository of feminine knowledge; a "different" woman, excluded from the community and buried alone out of fear; a witch ante litteram, whose spirit no one would dare disturb again.
Readings don't come from a single context. We find them in popular culture, in literature, in local oral history, and even in the most authoritative academic journals.[2].
I'll say it right away: I too have a reading of Sisaia, and I support it: the woman who was not just a patient of that knowledge about healing, but an active participant. But I'm not including her in this gallery, and not because I'm right and others are wrong. No reading is born from material alone, not even mine: mine, too, was born from a desire. The difference lies in what a reading is willing to risk afterwards. A portrait demands to be believed; a hypothesis is delivered with its passages clearly laid out, in a book where anyone can challenge them, and if the material doesn't support it, it falls. In part, this has already happened: working on these episodes, I've corrected more than one detail I took for granted. A hypothesis can be dismantled, a dream cannot. Method isn't used to avoid mistakes: it's used to notice them. The problem isn't that these readings exist. It's a question of dates.
The answer was already there
The fictionalized narratives about Sisaia didn't arise in a knowledge vacuum, waiting for science to fill it. The opposite is true: they flourished after 1978, after Ferrarese Ceruti and Germanà's study had already put down on paper the most sober answers. The position of the body? The tunnel. The fractures? Perhaps a single trauma, and the bones don't reveal which. Death? Of unknown cause, attributable neither to fractures nor to trepanation. The "solitary and anomalous" burial? The 1976 essays had already shown that the cave had been used before, for another burial from the same culture: the solitude of Sisaia is, literally, less solitary than it is described.
So, it wasn't a void filled while waiting for the data. The data was there, and the best story still won.
The question that remains
This shifts the focus. No longer: who was Sisaiah? But: why do we need her to have been someone exceptional?
Because it's a question that concerns us, not her. A woman alone in a cave, a pierced skull, four thousand years of silence: it's almost irresistible narrative material, and every era has poured into it what it sought: mystery, marginality, lost female power. The problem isn't that these readings exist, and it's unfair to dismiss them as naiveté: they are, almost always, acts of affection. The problem is that they were deposited on top of a dossier that said otherwise, and which no one has since reopened.
But there is a way out, and it doesn't involve giving up on the story. It involves taking seriously the most solid fact of all—the healed trepanation—and asking what it really implies. A person doesn't survive a cranial surgery alone in the Early Bronze Age. From there, another story begins, and it's the one we'll follow in the podcast.
The bones and the story
Four thousand years later, Sisaia continues to do what it has done since 1961: reveal those who look at it. Its bones say little, and that little is precious; its narrators, myself included, say much, and that much speaks above all of us.
Distinguishing data from narrative doesn't mean abandoning the narrative. It means declaring it: always knowing, and always saying, when the data ends and the interpretation begins. It's the only way to continue telling Sisaia's story without burying it a second time, under our desires.
So the question remains open, and it's the right question: what are we afraid of when we let story take the place of data?
Sisaia is the focus of the two episodes that close the first season of "Who's Afraid of the Goddess?" on the Prehistory channel in Italy: the first episode, "The Wall on Nothing," will air in October, followed by episode two, "A Bed of Flowers in Winter." The theme of the sacred feminine in Sardinia is explored in the book "The Sacred Feminine in Sardinia. Symbols, Rites, and Forms of Power" (Venexia, January 2027).
[1] Ferrarese Ceruti Maria Luisa and Germanà Franco – “Female burial in the «Sisaia» cave, Dorgali” – in central-eastern Sardinia from the Neolithic to the end of the ancient world – exhibition catalogue for the 20th Scientific Meeting of the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory (Nuoro, Civic Speleo-archaeological Museum) – Sassari – Dessì – 1978 – pp. 103-107.
[2] The case also crosses the most authoritative academic register. Lo Schiavo and Milletti (2016), in a contribution that otherwise attacks the androcentrism of Nuragic studies, present the site as the "Tomb of the Witch," picking up a nickname already in circulation, and report that Sisaia never had children, although parity is notoriously difficult to establish on osteological grounds. Evidently, even specialist literature is not immune to this narrative habit.
References
- Arena Fabiola, Larocca Felice and Gualdi-Russo Emanuela – “Cranial Surgery in Italy During the Bronze Age” – in World Neurosurgery - 157 - 2022 - pp. 36-44;
- Becheroni Ornella – The face of Sisaia. Four thousand years old, but she doesn't look it. A woman from Sardinia's prehistory. – Sassari – Carlo Delfino – 2014;
- Carta T., “Discovery of Sisaia” – in Gruttas and Nurras – Quaderni del Gruppo Grotte Nuorese – February 2026 – pp. 44-51 (autograph testimony of one of the discoverers, July 2019: source of the tilimba identification; the volume is a collective work in the speleological and naturalistic fields, not subjected to peer review);
- Ferrarese Ceruti Maria Luisa and Germanà Franco – “Female burial in the cave of «Sisaia», Dorgali” – in Central-eastern Sardinia from the Neolithic to the end of the ancient world – exhibition catalogue for the 20th Scientific Meeting of the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory (Nuoro, Civic Speleo-archaeological Museum) – Sassari – Dessì – 1978 – pp. 103-107;
- Ferrarese Ceruti Maria Luisa and Germanà Franco – “Sisaia. A cave deposition from the Bonnanaro culture” – in Notebooks of the Superintendency of Archaeological Heritage for the Provinces of Sassari and Nuoro – n. 6 – Sassari – 1978;
- Floris Francesco – “«In Hindsight». Archaeological Reflections” – in Gruttas and Nurras – Quaderni del Gruppo Grotte Nuorese – February 2026 – pp. 58-66 (archaeological review of the dossier);
- Germanà Franco – Man in Sardinia from the Paleolithic to the Nuragic Age – Sassari – Carlo Delfino – 1995;
- Germanà Franco and Fornaciari Gino – Trepanations, craniotomies, and cranial trauma in Italy from prehistory to the modern age – Pisa – Gardens – 1992;
- Giuffra Valentina and Fornaciari Gino – “Trepanation in Italy: A Review” – in International Journal of Osteoarchaeology - 27 - 2017 - pp. 745-767;
- Lo Schiavo Fulvia and Milletti Matteo – “The Nuragic Women: Facts and Hypotheses on Bronze Age Sardinian Women” – in Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean MacIntosh Turfa (eds.) – Women in Antiquity: Real Women across the Ancient World – London-New York – Routledge – 2016 – pp. 749-768;
- Murgia Michela – “From Sisaiu to Sisaia” – in Gruttas and Nurras – Notebooks of the Nuorese Caves Group – February 2026 – pp. 28-37 (for the origin of the name Sisaiu).
Arianna Carta, 8 September 2026
