L'Isola del Millennio Prima. Semiotica Archeologica e Identità come Nostalgia

Islands are often believed to be very specific, immutable, isolated entities: they are described in relation to their exoticism and to their people’s attitude to long waits. This essay aims to reflect on the persistence of these images of islands, by investigating Sardinia and the ways the archaeological language used between the late ’60s and late ’90s to describe it and its communities has linked the geographic dimension of the island to a temporal one. This intertwining between geographic, human, and temporal dimensions, where each element is shaped in a way that re- sembles the other two, is expressed by a rigid process of identification that deserves semiotic attention. By doing so, the essay unveils the existence of a strong relation- ship between a specific idea of insularity and one of rigid identity. Re–enhancing the idea of identity as a dynamic process that spins around the choices and relationships of human groups, this essay highlights the possibility that persistent, orientalising, models of island still — that we might call islandism — feed (and are vice versa fed by) a widespread idea of Sardinia as both a geographical and temporal island (un’isola antica) that aims nostalgically at a specific point of its past: an island of the Millenni- um before. The essay aims at contributing to the semiotic debate around islands by supporting the idea that the fixed image of islands and that of immutable identities (identifications) derive from the same problem: a misuse of semiotic tools such as the definition of signs. The reader of this essay will be accompanied, through the heading of each section, by the enlightening thoughts and confessions of a famous fictional character who is himself obsessively aiming at his personal island set in the past: Roberto de la Grive.