24 Hobart
Sardinia. Although he was not always in agreement with the archaeologists
working in Pisa, Tangheroni was open to continuous revision and incorporated
dating derived from the analysis of material culture.54
The presence of deserted villages is a topic that has received a lot of attention
in the last 50 years. When the architectural historian Raffaello Delogu created a
map of all the ecclesiastical buildings on the island in 1953, he identified differ-
ent settlement patterns across regions.55 Interestingly, many of the churches
he analyzed were placed at a distance from any known settlement or castle.
In the early 1970s, the question of why churches were not built in proximity
to the populations they allegedly served, was partially answered by John Day’s
demographic study of the condaghe documents produced by the giudici, the
Pisans, and the Genoese, after 1050, which shows how they reorganized space,
labor, and taxes.56 While some villages survived, many were abandoned, and
their communities migrated to larger centers or were decimated by plagues.
Marco Tangheroni also approached the subject of deserted villages from the
perspective of social history, using demographic and topographic analysis.
In so doing, Tangheroni was motivated by Jacques Le Goff and the École des
Annales, which advocated stretching broad regional contexts together with
local micro-histories.57 Tangheroni based his own research on the data sum-
marized in the Atlante della Sardegna.58
54 Graziella Berti, Catia Renzi Rizzo, and Marco Tangheroni, eds, “Pisa e il Mediterraneo
occidentale nei secoli VII–XIII: l’apporto congiunto delle fonti scritte e di quelle archeo-
logiche,” in Actes du colloque international: Interactions culturelles en Méditerranée occi-
dentale pendant l’antiquité tardive, le moyen âge et les temps moderne. (Perpignan 2000)
(Paris, 2004); Graziella Berti and Sauro Gelichi, “Commerci e vie di comunicazioni nelle
testimonianze ceramiche,” in ‘Pisani viri in insulis et transmarinis regionibus potentes’, Pisa
come nodo di comunicazioni nei secoli centrali del medioevo, eds M.L. Ceccarelli Lemut and
G. Garzella (Pisa, 1998).
55 Raffaello Delogu, L’architettura del medioevo in Sardegna (1953).
56 John Day, Villaggi abbandonati in Sardegna dal Trecento al Settecento. Inventario (Paris,
1973); John Day, “Malthus démenti? Sous-peuplement chronique et calamités dé-
mographiques en Sardaigne au bas moyen âge,” Annales E.S.C. 30 (1975), pp. 684–702;
Angela Terrosu Asole, L’insediamento umano medioevale e i centri abbandonati tra il secolo
XIV ed il secolo XVII supplemento al fascicolo II dell’Atlante della Sardegna (Rome, 1974).
57 Marco Tangheroni, “Per lo studio dei villaggi abbandonati a Pisa e in Sardegna nel
Trecento,” Bollettino Storico Pisano 40/41 (1971–1972), pp. 55–74; Marco Tangheroni,
Sardegna Mediterranea (Rome, 1983).
58 Roberto Pracchi, Angela Terrosu Asole, and Mario Giuseppe Riccardi, Atlante della
Sardegna (Cagliari, 1971), and in particular the special supplement to the volume by
Angela Terrosu Asole, L’insediamento umano medioevale e i centri abbandonati tra il secolo
XIV ed il secolo XVII supplemento al fascicolo II dell’Atlante della Sardegna (Rome, 1974).