Sardinia as a Crossroads in the Mediterranean: An Introduction

2017

The Making of Medieval Sardinia, 2021

Preprint version. Pagination is the same as the printed version.

2018

The book offers a historical and methodological update of founding historical themes and moments, and a methodological review more than ever necessary of current interpretations of the History of Sardinia between the Early Middle Ages and the Modernity from an identitarian point of view. And that by means of a greater interaction between History, History of Art, Geography, Archaeology and Architecture. Sardinia has been taken as a case study due to its island nature, with boundaries clearly determined by Geography and, moreover, by its extremely conservative nature. The authors’ aim is to provide scholars with new data and new reading keys to interpret Sardinian History and its Cultural Heritage. Both strongly conditioned by the permanence of Sardinia in Roman and Byzantine orbit, lato sensu, for more than a millennium (3rd c. b.C - 11th c. a.C) and by two other important elements: only about 80 years of a virtually irrelevant Vandalic domain and no Muslim lasting settlements throughout the High Middle Ages, not so far decisively confirmed by Archaeology.

"Overview of Sardinian History (500-1500)", in A Companion to Sardinian History, 500-1500, ed. Michelle Hobart, Brill, Leiden-Boston 2017, pp. 85-114.

2018

RiMe, n. 3 n. s., 2018

Recent research in the north African regions between the classical period and the Arab conquest highlight how the Roman and late antique settlement fabric survived almost unchanged the first Arab conquest of north Africa; such research is debunking catastrophist narratives on the first wave of Arabs in North Africa. It would be constructive to compare the experiences of study on the evolution of settlement with those about Sardinia; they focused on the traumatic events of XIIIth and XIVth centuries, and on the institutional causes of rural depopulation, but also on the integration of these data acquired with the new contributions from geoarchaeology and paleoclimatology

BAR Publishing, 2019

Despite Sardinia’s extraordinarily rich Neolithic record, very little of it has made its way into the general European discourse. Written as a companion to G. Webster and M. Webster, Punctuated Insularity. The Archaeology of 4th and 3rd Millennium Sardinia. Oxford: BAR International Series 2871, 2017, the present volume addresses the omission by offering a synthesis of an archaeological corpus still little known outside the island. It covers in detail the evidence of colonisations and subsequent adaptations to the Sardinia’s diverse environments in terms of settlement patterns, craft industries, subsistence economies, mortuary and non-mortuary cult expressions, imagery, art and extra-insular relations with special emphasis of neighbouring Corsica, while offering interpretive suggestions. As a study of the frequentation and settling of Sardinia as a locale, a large, insular, west-Mediterranean landmass, by people with non-indigenous heritages, it furthermore locates the island’s cultural modalities within the so-called neolithisation of the broader Tyrrhenian region during the sixth and fifth millennia BCE.

Visigothic Symposia 3, 2018

The essay presents some parallelisms on the concept of "border" and the relations among Vandals, Byzantines and Sardinians on the one hand, and among Byzantines, Goths and Hispano-Romans, on the other, in the former Roman provinces of Sardinia and Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula) during the early Middle Ages. To do so, I analyze the modern identitarian and nationalistic uses of that historical period within the context of its historiography. In parts of both Sardinian and Iberian historiography there is the tendency to highlight the imagined 'originative' role of indigenous peoples, complemented by the relatively small influence, in some areas of northern Iberia and the mountainous center of Sardinia, of Roman colonization. In these areas, the role of Barbaricini (the inhabitants of the Civitates Barbariae of the interior of Sardinia mentioned by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian [r. 527-565]), Hispano-Romans, proud opponents of the Empire, and "true" Sardinians and Iberians have been exalted. Employing Maurice Halbwachs's theoretical rubric, I show how these specific stereotypes, historical and historiographical myths, confirmed memory and identity and were the result of continuous choices-conscious or not-of what people wanted to remember, wanted to be, and wanted to be represented as, and what that means for historical reconstruction.