Rural Landscapes of the Punic World

Phoenician and Punic archaeology have long been overlooked by Mediterranean archaeologists, whose attention has mostly been focused on Greek and Roman cultures. Moreover, obscured by a strong urban bias, the rural landscapes of the Punic world have only begun to be investigated over the last two decades.This book offers the first comprehensive overview of rural settlement in the Punic world by bringing together and comparing evidence from across the western Mediterranean. A substantial part of the volume is taken up by a detailed discussion of the literary and archaeological evidence for Punic rural settlement in Sardinia, Sicily, Ibiza, Andalusia and North Africa. It also explores the multiple connections between rural settlement, agrarian organisation and regional colonial situations to offer new insights in Carthaginian colonialism and local Punic rural settlement, and their role in the wider Mediterranean context.By publishing this evidence and new interpretations in English, this book intends 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.

It is the aim of this book to investigate Punic rural settlement in the western Mediterranean by bringing together and comparing the currently dispersed existing evidence for rural Punic settlement.

1 Defining the Punic World and its Rural Contexts 2 Rereading Punic Agriculture: Representation, Analogy and Ideology in the Classical Sources Veronique Krings 3 Ibiza: the Making of New Landscapes Carlos Gomez Bellard 4 The Iberian Peninsula: Landscapes of Tradition Jose Luis Lopez Castro 5 North Africa: Rural Settlement and Agricultural Production Elizabeth Fentress and Roald F. Docter 6 Sicily and Malta: between Sea and Countryside Antonella Spano Giammellaro, Francesca Spatafora and Peter van Dommelen 7 Sardinia: Diverging Landscapes Peter van Dommelen and Stefano Finocchi 8 Agrarian Landscapes and Rural Communities 9 Conclusions: Rural Landscapes of the Punic World