Tuvixeddu hill is home to what was already considered the largest and most significant Punic necropolis in the Mediterranean in the 19th century. Long damaged by the cultivation of the quarries that supplied the cement plant, the necropolis still retains much of its striking extent. The sloping belt of the hill facing the lagoon, on whose banks the city of the living stood, is traversed by the dense succession of regular cuts of burials, consisting of a downhill shaft, with an average depth of about 3 meters. In Roman times a small part of the area was for some time used to quarry building stones. During World War II it housed many people who had lost their homes to bombing, in a state of disrepair that lasted long after the conflict ended. The importance of the necropolis emerged because of the impetus given to research by Antonio Taramelli, superintendent of antiquities of Sardinia in the first thirty years of the last century, with the excavation of Predio Ibba, the first in the hill to be conducted with rigorous scientific criteria over a large area. The surveys, carried out in 1908, involved 180 hypogea.
