Much is known, for example, about the cultures that developed throughout  Europe in the late stone age. In Sardinia, their artefacts  include decorated  pottery and granite  idols. 

In the central period of the Neolithic (4300-3000 BC), groups of humans, living in caves, moved inland from the sea and began to built huts to live in, to  dig tombs  in the rock (in Sardinian they are called "Domus de janas" that is "fairy houses") where they buried  their dead, sometimes whith precious grave goods.

When traveling through the island, one’s eye is often attracted by small openings like the doors of so many houses  in the faces of cliffs besides a valley or in the celfts of hills.
These are domus de janas, the homes  of little fairies that weave golden fabrics  on golden loom, must stand aside  in favour of the most prosaic version of archeologist, for whom these are prenuragic  necropolises, mostly  un the form of the tiny rooms with a roundish floor plan carved out of the rock, or most complex layouts  such as that of Sant’Andra Priu near Bonorva, whose
open corridor leads to a colonnaded courtyard where it may be supposed  thet the protosardinians  gathered both to pay homage to their  dead and to pray to the Mother goddess and the bull god represented in numerous votive  stattuetes. The doors, rafters and fireplace embodied in some of these tombs provide the usual  examples of the primitive  belief  in resurrection and an after-life in dwellings similar to those occupied by the living.  

 

anghelu ruju In the period of the recent Neolithic (3000-2400 BC), the productive economy grew (the so-called “agricultural revolution”, with the wider diffusion of groups exchanges among themselves and with other countries in the Mediterranean. This gave rise to a system of social organization based on the family. 
The communities formed villages with essential services and developed particular types of tombs  which now assumed a monumental appearance. The hypogeums are particularly impressive, composed of “cities of the dead” which reproduce the people’s  houses with the details of the architectural finishing of the interior and with a symbolic decorations depicting patterns of the heads and horns of bulls and rams (sacred animals), silhouettes of the female  
deity and other symbolic linear motifs, attractively composed in sculpture and painting, on walls, pillars, doors and ceilings. Outstanding examples of hypogeums may be seen at Anghelu Ruju -Alghero, Mandra Antine - Thiesi, Sant’Andrea Priu - Bonorva, Montessu - Villaperuccio.