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.

The role of the Phoenicians in the economy, culture and politics of the ancient Mediterranean was as large as that of the Greeks and Romans, and deeply interconnected with that 'classical' world, but their lack of literature and their oriental associations mean that they are much less well-known. This book brings state-of-the-art international scholarship on Phoenician and Punic studies to an English-speaking audience, collecting new papers from fifteen leading voices in the field from Europe and North Africa, with a bias towards the younger generation. Focusing on a series of case-studies from the colonial world of the western Mediterranean, it asks what 'Phoenician' and 'Punic' actually mean, how Punic or western Phoenician identity has been constructed by ancients and moderns, and whether there was in fact a 'Punic world'.

A revisionist exploration of identities and interactions in the 'Punic World' of the western Mediterranean.

The Phoenicians created the Mediterranean world as we know it--yet they remain a poorly understood group. In this Handbook, the first of its kind in English, readers will find expert essays covering the history, culture, and areas of settlement throughout the Phoenician and Punic world.

By taking a look at colonization and subalternity, this book offers a different view on Classical Greece and its modern legacy.

Insularity – the state or condition of being an island – has played a key role in shaping the identities of populations inhabiting islands of the Mediterranean. As entities surrounded by water and usually possessing different landscapes and ecosystems from those of the mainland, islands allow for the potential to study both the land and the sea. Archaeologically, they have the potential to reveal distinct identities shaped by such forces as invasion, imperialism, colonialism, and connectivity. The theme of insularity and identity in the Roman period has not been the subject of a book length study but has been prevalent in scholarship dealing with the prehistoric periods. The papers in this book explore the concepts of insularity and identity in the Roman period by addressing some of the following questions: what does it mean to be an island? How has insularity shaped ethnic, cultural, and social identity in the Mediterranean during the Roman period? How were islands connected to the mainland and other islands? Did insularity produce isolation or did the populations of Mediterranean islands integrate easily into a common ‘Roman’ culture? How has maritime interaction shaped the economy and culture of specific islands? Can we argue for distinct ‘island identities’ during the Roman period? The twelve papers presented here each deal with specific islands or island groups, thus allowing for an integrated view of Mediterranean insularity and identity.

Over the past decades, archaeological field surveys and excavations have greatly enriched our knowledge of the Roman countryside Drawing on such new data, the volume The Economic Integration of Roman Italy, edited by Tymon de Haas and Gijs Tol, presents a series of papers that explore the changes Rome’s territorial and economic expansion brought about in the countryside of the Italian peninsula. By drawing on a variety of source materials (e.g. pottery, settlement patterns, environmental data), they shed light on the complexity of rural settlement and economies on the local, regional and supra-regional scales. As such, the volume contributes to a re-assessment of Roman economic history in light of concepts such as globalisation, integration, economic performance and growth.

Material Connections eschews outdated theory, tainted by colonialist attitudes, and develops a new cultural and historical understanding of how factors such as mobility, materiality, conflict and co-presence impacted on the formation of identity in the ancient Mediterranean. Fighting against ‘hyper-specialisation’ within the subject area, it explores the multiple ways that material culture was used to establish, maintain and alter identities, especially during periods of transition, culture encounter and change. A new perspective is adopted, one that perceives the use of material culture by prehistoric and historic Mediterranean peoples in formulating and changing their identities. It considers how objects and social identities are entangled in various cultural encounters and interconnections. The movement of people as well as objects has always stood at the heart of attempts to understand the courses and process of human history. The Mediterranean offers a wealth of such information and Material Connections, expanding on this base, offers a dynamic, new subject of enquiry – the social identify of prehistoric and historic Mediterranean people – and considers how migration, colonial encounters, and connectivity or insularity influence social identities. The volume includes a series of innovative, closely related case studies that examine the contacts amongst various Mediterranean islands – Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, the Balearics – and the nearby shores of Italy, Greece, North Africa, Spain and the Levant to explore the social and cultural impact of migratory, colonial and exchange encounters. Material Connections forges a new path in understanding the material culture of the Mediterranean and will be essential for those wishing to develop their understanding of material culture and identity in the Mediterranean.

The Phoenicians present a tantalizing face to the ancient historian. Latin sources suggest they once had an extensive literature of history, law, philosophy and religion; but all now is lost. Offering new insights based on recent archaeological discoveries in their heartland of modern-day Lebanon, Mark Woolmer presents a fresh appraisal of this fascinating, yet elusive, Semitic people. Discussing material culture, language and alphabet, religion (including sacred prostitution of women and boys to the goddess Astarte), funerary custom and trade and expansion into the Punic west, he explores Phoenicia in all its paradoxical complexity. Viewed in antiquity as sage scribes and intrepid mariners who pushed back the boundaries of the known world, and as skilled engineers who built monumental harbour cities like Tyre and Sidon, the Phoenicians were also considered (especially by their rivals, the Romans) to be profiteers cruelly trading in human lives. The author shows them above all to have been masters of the sea: this was a civilization that circumnavigated Africa two thousand years before Vasco da Gama did it in 1498.

The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean offers new insights into the material and social practices of many different Mediterranean peoples during the Bronze and Iron Ages, presenting in particular those features that both connect and distinguish them. Contributors discuss in depth a range of topics that motivate and structure Mediterranean archaeology today, including insularity and connectivity; mobility, migration, and colonization; hybridization and cultural encounters; materiality, memory, and identity; community and household; life and death; and ritual and ideology. The volume's broad coverage of different approaches and contemporary archaeological practices will help practitioners of Mediterranean archaeology to move the subject forward in new and dynamic ways. Together, the essays in this volume shed new light on the people, ideas, and materials that make up the world of Mediterranean archaeology today, beyond the borders that separate Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.