384 Milanese
A vertical rise in the cemetery’s floor, brought about through the retrieval of
land in which new burials were made, was most likely the result of the cem-
etery reaching its saturation point.
At this still embryonic stage of analysis, the context of the pottery from
the sediments of Phases 2 and 3 prevents the definition of a precise chronol-
ogy, but it can nevertheless be dated in a preliminary manner to between the
late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The burials of Phase 2 lie in a south-
west/northeast direction, which differs little from that governing the previous
phase. On the other hand, those of Phase 3 assume a north-south orientation,
similar to that of the subsequent Phase 4. The burials of Phase 2 assume the
form of a single (occasionally a double) trench in the ground, and were fre-
quently altered in the following Phases 4 and 5. According to this preliminary
stratigraphic chronology, large portions of Phases 2 and 3 were anterior to the
edict published by Ferdinand the Catholic on 27 August 1495, which conced-
ed Algherese citizenship to non-Catalan residents. Thus, these burials might
represent a nucleus of pobladors ethnically linked to Catalonia.70 The disposi-
tion of 1495 seems to have broken the barrier of Alghero’s Catalan enclave and
boosted the Sardinization of the city in the sixteenth century.71
On the other hand, an altogether different mode of burial was used in the
mass grave related to the sixteenth-century plague. This burial contained the
bodies of individuals who died at the same time or within a short period of
each other and were buried nearly simultaneously. They were interned in col-
lective burials in trenches or long, narrow pits (5–6 m), each containing the
remains of on average 10–15 individuals (a maximum of 30 were recorded in
trench no. 10). So far, 16 such trenches have been found, totaling approximately
200 bodies. Ten multiple graves of a rectangular shape, with an average of six
inhumed bodies apiece, were located in the same burial phase, intersecting
with the single-pit graves of the earlier sepulchral phase (no. 2).
In its features, size, density, and the nature of the archaeological evidence,
the plague cemetery in Alghero is unique, not only in Sardinia and the Italian
peninsula, but in the entire Mediterranean.72 This discovery is capable of pro-
viding anthropological information pertinent not merely on a local level, but
70 Conde y Delgado de Molina, “Il ripopolamento catalano di Alghero.”
71 Antonio Budruni, “Aspetti di vita sociale in Alghero durante l’età spagnola,” in Mattone
and Sanna, Alghero, la Catalogna, il Mediterraneo, p. 335.
72 Comparable cemeteries, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have
been documented in France; see Michel Signoli, Stephan Tzortzis, Bruno Bizot, Yann
Ardagna, Catherine Rigeade, and Isabelle Séguy, “Découverte d’un cimetière de pestiférés
du XVIIème siècle (Puy-St-Pierre, Hautes Alpes, France),” in Peste: Entre É pidémies