ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE ‘IN‐BETWEEN’ IN EARLY FOURTH MILLENNIUM SARDINIA

Abstract

SummaryThe appearance on Sardinia during the first half of the fourth millennium of an unprecedented and extraordinary cult edifice in the form of a monumental temple mound – the Red Temple at Monte d'Accoddi – was paralleled across the island by an outpouring of anthropomorphic cult imagery expressed in sculpture, inscription, and reliefs – equally unprecedented and unmatched locally. Based on a deeper reading of Bhabha’s notion of ‘inbetweenness’ it is argued that the contemporary dispersion of diverse anthropomorphic cult gestures coalesced through varied media in what is suggestive of a state of iconographic – and by implication ideological/spiritual – uncertainty, contestation, and ambivalence consistent with a state of inbetweenness – as understood here in Bhabha's sense of a third‐space of relations.