RURAL LANDSCAPES OF THE PUNIC WORLD

Phoenician and Punic archaeology have long been overlooked by Mediterranean archaeologists, who focused their attention on Greek and Roman cultures. Although the Punic cities and their rural landscapes are to be found along the southern shores and on the islands of the western Mediterranean basin, comprehensive studies of these archaeological remains are virtually non-existent. This book investigates Punic rural settlement in the western Mediterranean by bringing together and comparing the currently dispersed existing evidence for rural Punic settlement. The core of the volume is accordingly made up by a detailed discussion of the archaeological evidence for Punic rural settlement from Sardinia, Sicily, Ibiza, mainland Spain and North Africa. Because agriculture and agrarian produce have always been assumed to have played a critical role in the Carthaginian colonial expansion, the connections between the various colonial contexts and the local characteristics of rural organisation are explored in detail in order to enhance our understanding of these colonial contexts. This in turn provides better insight into Carthaginian colonialism and local Punic rural settlement and their role in the wider Mediterranean context. By publishing this evidence and these interpretations in English, the authors hope to draw attention to Punic archaeology in general and to these rural studies in particular, and to situate them in the wider Mediterranean context of both classical Antiquity and Mediterranean archaeology.

Peter van Dommelen teaches in the Department of Archaeology of the University of Glasgow (Scotland). His main interest lies in the archaeology and anthropology of the rural Mediterranean as well as of colonialism in general. He has been involved in fieldwork and related studies in Sardinia since 1991.Carlos Gomez Bellard teaches in the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology of the University of Valencia (Spain). He has long been interested in the organization of agricultural production and rural settlement in Phoenician and Punic Ibiza. He has excavated and surveyed extensively in Ibiza and Mediterranean Spain.