386 Milanese
The cemetery of San Michele thus tells the story of a true collective tragedy,
which struck Alghero in a drastic manner, sweeping away entire families. Aside
from being used for the burial and probable reassembly of nuclear families, the
cemetery was located in close proximity to the church of San Michele, which
served as the pro tempore cathedral of Alghero from 1567 to 1593. The appar-
ent absence of ergonomic indicators of excessive labor on the bones of the
inhumed suggest that the people laid in the trench graves belonged to a mid-
dling social stratum and were perhaps well-to-do tradesmen or artisans, but at
any rate not laborers, such as farmers, masons, or fishermen. Anthropological
information thus far derived from the collective burials of Phase 4, such as the
absence of Mediterranean anemia, combined with the location of the graves in
the privileged vicinity of such an important religious edifice, suggest that the
people who perished in the plague were comfortably well-off, and thus were
likely Catalan persons, an ethnic and cultural identity that has profoundly
shaped the city of Alghero to the present day.
Translated by Irina Oryshkevich and Michelle Hobart