Mediterranean Archaeology

A part of the course follows the journey of Phoenicians across the Mediterranean along the trade routes to the West at the beginnings of the first millennium BC. We will travel together with the Phoenician merchants who founded emporia and cities along the “Route of the Great Islands”, leading from Phoenicia to the Central and Western Mediterranean. The journey will take us to Motya, an ancient Phoenician colony in Western Sicily which increases its political and commercial power in the Central Mediterranean and beyond from the 8th to the 4th century BC. At Motya we will analyze the modalities of interaction, dialogue and coexistence between the newcomers and local population, discovering a model of exchange that overcomes the dynamics of trade, and embraces religious traditions, technologies, population, in an out-and-out system of mutual enrichment. These dynamics unfold in the background of the historical events that, in the central centuries of the first millennium BC, involve two other powerful civilizations in Western Mediterranean, the Greeks and the Etruscans. The Etruscan cities played and extremely significant role in the Mediterranean in the first millennium BC, beginning with the international hub of Caere (8th-6th cent. BC), evidenced by the thesauros the city built at Delphi, and continuing with the crucial involvement of Tarquinii and Veii in the history of Archaic Rome and with the management of the often difficult political and commercial relations with the Punic and Greek colonies in the northern sector of the Tyrrhenian sea, in which the city of Volci was fully involved in the Archaic period. The course will explore this complex mosaic, paying particular attention to the data that can be gained from the funerary record and from the ports of the ancient Etruscan cities, considering them under the light of their economic, political and religious roles.