Phoenician Settlements in Andalusia. A GIS-based Analysis.

Sebastian Müller, IMSIntroduction
The end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean between 1200 and 1100 BC saw the collapse of
several civilizations in its eastern part and, thus, the decline of a formally high degree ofconnectedness. However, by the turn of the millennium other actors appeared on the map andextended the far-reaching connections across the entire Mediterranean and beyond. The first to
establish a network that was including the entire Mediterranean were the Phoenicians whose
homeland was located along the east Mediterranean coast.
The Iberian Peninsula and particularly the region of Andalusia was a main destination ofPhoenician expeditions and, subsequently, settlement foundations. The talk aims to analyze thereasons of the Phoenician exploration of the Mediterranean Sea and it tries to investigate therelationship between Phoenician settlers and the local people in Andalusia based on the locationand distribution of their settlements.

Fig. 1: Phoenician network and settlement foundations in the Mediterranean.

The Phoenicians in the Levant

The Phoenician homeland was located in the Levant along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean
Sea. Phoenician people lived in cities that functioned as full-fledged states. It is important tohighlight that despite a number of common features such as the language, religion, economy,organization of the society etc. the Phoenicians were not a group of people with a common identity.
At times the city states stood in competition with each other and they emphasized their own senseof belonging through the worship of a city god, own rituals and many more.
The Phoenicians developed a unique expertise in constructing ships and in seafaring. At thebeginning of the first millennium BC until c. 850 BC, when Greek people started their naval
explorations, Phoenician ships were the only vessels that sailed and oared across the entire
Mediterranean.
The reasons that might have triggered the interest of the Phoenicians to navigate beyond theircoastal waters has been discussed for a long time. One is certainly the threat of the Assyrian Empire
that took control of the Levant by the end of the 9th century BC and which was famous for
extracting huge amounts of wealth from their subordinates in order to finance the lavish life-styleof the elite in the Assyrian core area. The Phoenician cities were part of the empire but retained aparticular degree of independence through the regular payment of high tributes. These tributes had
to be earned through exchanges and trade with other people in the Mediterranean. This traditional
interpretation of the Phoenician explorations is, however, contested through the results of naturalscientific dating of the first Phoenician settlements which are all older than the Assyrian conquest.
It is safe to say, that the obvious wealth of the Phoenician cities was based to a huge degree on
trade, with a particular emphasis on metals. As traders the Phoenicians also had to offers something
in return for the desired goods from foreign lands. It is being reported in ancient written sourcesthat the Phoenicians gave rather less valuable items that were, however, due to their exoticism andrareness objects of great value in the western Mediterranean, in exchange for highly valuedresources. Although this reports are quite plausible, the Phoenicians also had something that wasof immense value within the entire Mediterranean, which only people with large resources on theirhands were able to purchase: purple dye. The purple pigments are an element of the Murex
brandaris and Murex trunculus snails, which have several habitats in the Mediterranean Sea, one
at the Levantine coast. The production of larger quantities of purple requires a particular know-how, the needed facilities and access to extreme huge amounts of the snail. The reason is thattwelve-thousand snails do not yield more than 1.4 g purple which is just enough to color a small
stripe of cloth.

The Phoenicians in Andalusia

As mentioned above, Andalusia was one of the main destinations of Phoenician people. Famous
Phoenician city foundations are Gadir (Cádiz), Almuñécar, Huelva and Málaga. According torecent natural scientific datings the foundation of some of these places goes back until the turn ofthe millennium which means that the foundation of the cities took place at the same time as thePhoenicians started to explore the sea.
It is clear that the geographic location and other factors played a significant role for the selectionof potential settlement locations. One pattern has been recognized for a while: it is the tendency toestablish the settlements on islands next to the coast or on the tip of land tongues that restricted theaccess to the settlements and allowed for a better defense. This is however not a specific elementof Phoenician settlements in Andalusia, it is a strategy known from the Phoenician homeland. The
powerful and through historical sources well-known city of Tyre is a good example in this regard.
There has been a long dispute about the nature of the Phoenician settlements outside theirhomeland and specifically in Andalusia. Although the intend for the settlement foundation isalways seen in the access to and control of the resources in the southern part of the Iberian
Peninsula, it has been assumed that particular cities developed from trade outposts to full-fledged
cities. Recent archaeological finds seem to support this idea and they also show that in locations
that were considered to belong to the local communities, strong Phoenician elements, such as cultplaces, were present.

Fig. 2: Distribution map of mines of valued metals (Cu, Sn, Ag, Pb) and of Phoenician as well as
local settlements.

GIS-based Studies

The application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has a long history in archaeologicalresearch and a number of methods have been developed to gain information beyond the mere
distribution of sites. The analysis of larger datasets comes, however, with a cost which is a rather
blurry picture of the past. This is because not each of the known sites has been researched in thesame extent. Important evidence that affect the character of a location might be still unearthed.
Additionally, the available distribution maps are only a snap-shot of the state of research. In someareas the actual picture might be quite complete, whilst in other regions a dramatic increase of sites
could change the way the situation is being evaluated.
Another problem is even more difficult to solve. It is the question of the ethnic identity of thepeople in the settlements. In the best scenario, archaeology is able to recognize the origin of anartefact, for instance, if a vessel was produced by Phoenician or local standards. It is, however,unequally difficult to figure out which people used a particular item and if these people identified
themselves accordingly as local or as Phoenician. It is highly expectable that this was only the casein the initial phase of Phoenician settlement foundations. Depending on a number of factors it isquite likely that this distinction became increasingly blurry with the result that bot locals andPhoenicians were living together in particular locations or at least were using items from both sides
interchangeably.
Despite these restraints it is possible to recognize a few patterns that might be of help forunderstanding the role of the Phoenicians and their intentions a little bit better. The maps show
clearly the existence of clusters of settlements which could be indeed interpreted as associatedlocations that may have shared a degree of belongingness in common. The distribution ofsettlements with Phoenician finds is aligned to the course of the rivers. This is because rivers
functioned as main transport routes from the coast, where the main sites of the Phoenicians werelocated, and vice versa. The proximity to raw material deposits underlines the initial intend of thePhoenicians to secure the access and perhaps trading rights of these resources. Not directly
observable from the maps, but very likely is that the formally foreign arrivals became in course of
the several centuries spanning presence of Phoenician people in Andalusia locals. It is this overlayof different phases of the settlement activities that makes it from today’s perspective difficult tomake clear cut distinctions between locals and Phoenicians in later periods.

Conclusion
The GIS-based study of Phoenician and local settlements demonstrates as other similar
examinations that there is a high demand for intensive research on that matter in the southern partof the Iberian Peninsula and in Phoenicia. It becomes clear that there was no standard procedureof how Phoenicians interacted with the local population. This is because the local people were notorganized in large groups or state-like units but in smaller communities that all developed theirown response to the presence of Phoenician people. The distribution of settlements emphasizes astrong relation to the river systems. A major problem is the identification of settlements that wereexclusively or to the majority settled by Phoenicians and those sites that were mainly occupied by
the local people. Over the course of the centuries a mutual adjustment is expectable and – judging
by the known artefacts etc. – also recognizable.

In general, it can be argued that the relevance of Andalusia for the Phoenicians rested in thegeographic location at the western end of the Mediterranean Sea, the access to valued resources
and the cooperativeness of the local population to accept people of foreign lands in their homearea.