L’assetto insediativo della Sardegna bizantina (VI-XI secolo) attraverso lo studio dei manufatti numismatici

The present thesis, entitled “L’assetto insediativo della Sardegna bizantina (VI-XI secolo) attraverso lo studio dei manufatti numismatici” (“The Byzantine Settlement in Sardinia from VI to XI Century through the Analysis of the Coins”), is the final result of a research developed to reconstruct the peculiarities of the landscape and the territory by the potential of the coin as a marker, relatively to Sardinia when the island was part of the Byzantine Empire or at least it was influenced by the Byzantine culture. The research aims to focus the analysis of the coin on a both archaeological and numismatic perspective. Compared to other kinds and typologies of artifacts, the discovery of one or more coins offers a very large number of interpretation possibilities on social, economic and cultural phenomena of a place or a context, despite it is clear that discovered coins are only a part of the ones which had been lost or hidden in the past, which in turn were only a part of the originally minted ones. While considering those peculiarities, the scenery of coin circulation in Sardinia during the Byzantine centuries and less specifically the High Middle Age reflects a scenery which seems to manifest common points with other Italian local realities (like Rome, Tuscany, Liguria, Emilia-Romagna, Campania) and, less specifically, the Mediterranean (Africa, Spain, Crete), inside the wide economic evolution expressed by demographical, political and cultural changes, starting from the relationship between cities and countryside, which was described by Giorgio Chittolini as a “quasi città” (“almost a city”) for they were huge and interested by large economic interests. The developing of the research has led to the discovery of hundreds of byzantine coins, published and unpublished, connected to more than 70 different contexts, each one of them connoted with specific peculiarities. Aside from the coins clearly identifiable as “Byzantines”, where this definition would indicate those emitted directly from the Byzantine Government, the research also considered coins which were made previously (e.g. Punic or Roman Coins) but archaeologically found with items and artifacts connected to the Byzantine centuries (then, in a sense, potentially considered as Byzantine for they were already used centuries after their mintage). The possibility of having a so much large set of examples and the necessity of their analysis by their relation to the landscape led to develop the structure of the thesis by the Sardinian ancient road organization of the Itinerarium Antonini, which was still in use in the island during the Byzantine centuries