364 Milanese
the appearance of the port of Alghero in written sources), assumed the role of
landed lords in some areas of northeast Sardinia.12
Today, the initiative behind the foundation of Alghero and the development
of its port is most convincingly explained by a general climate of greater free-
dom for continental forces in Loguduro, which occurred after the extinction
of Sardinia’s ruling houses and the giudicato of Torres (1259–1272). This does
not mean that the inhabitation of the port of Alghero before the final quar-
ter of the thirteenth century is implausible; on the contrary, it most probably
did occur, since by 1281 a considerable volume of well-organized traffic can be
inferred. Nonetheless, it is likely that it was only in the 1250s and 1260s that
the patterns of development in the harbor of Alghero were clinched. This is
seemingly suggested by the earliest proofs of Campanian-made glazed Spiral
Ware pottery in Alghero, which dates to between the late twelfth and the
mid- to late thirteenth centuries. Besides the evidence of this type of pottery
in Sardinia—in architectural bacini from Cagliari-Santa Chiara (ante quem
1263), San Priamo, and San Vito—Spiral Ware pottery has also been identified
at archaeological sites in Alghero, among other places.13 Here, late thirteenth-
century Spiral Ware serves as the oldest chronological index hitherto identified
(though merely in the form of residue in an early fourteenth-century context)
of habitation at the Genoese port. All the same, stratigraphic documents of the
earliest habitation of Alghero in the Middle Ages are not particularly plentiful.
One “technical” reason for this scarce visibility could be attributed to the
formation processes by which the archaeological stratigraphy in Alghero took
shape. The urban area rests on a calcareous, morphologically irregular eleva-
tion (8–10 m above sea level), which is confirmed—as is usually the case in
hilly areas—by the variability of the rock’s depth—fairly shallow in some parts
of the city, but buried beneath meters of stratification in others. Wherever the
rock is shallow, transformations in the city have sometimes radically harmed
archaeological deposits, leading to their disappearance, while elsewhere, for-
mative processes that were affected by the creation of the mighty embank-
ments of the sixteenth-century fortifications obliterated older sequences, and
12 Although there is mention of numerous important (Porto Torres, Bosa) and minor
(Vignola) ports in cartularies compiled in the Genoese colony of Bonifacio (Corsica) in
the years 1238–1253, there is no mention of Alghero; Brown, “Alghero prima dei Catalani,”
pp. 49–50.
13 For Southern Italian pottery productions, and in particular Spiral Ware, see Michelle
Hobart, “Merchants, Monks, and Medieval Sardinian Architecture,” in Studies in
the Archaeology of the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. James J. Schryver (Leiden, 2010),
pp. 100–103.