ISAC Lecture, Carolina Lopez Ruiz

It's really wonderful to see such a robust turnout and attendance here this evening. Certainly one of the pleasures and benefits of my role in my capacity as director is that I get constantly introduced to new and exposed to new things. And I was just conversing briefly before the lecture with our speaker this evening who I think we passed in the hallways perhaps a few times but haven't really met before now. And so I'm actually I'm going to be learning as much as anyone else in this room about some of the research that I've been hearing about for some time but haven't yet had the chance to really see in any kind of detail. So I think we're really in for a treat this evening and it's it's a real privilege to be able to introduce our speaker and her subject this evening. Carolina Lopez Ruiz, a graduate of the University of Chicago. Going back some time I won't embarrass her by how many years it is but certainly from University of Chicago she held an appointment at Ohio State from about 2005 up until about 2022. So she's also somewhat like myself a returnee and also a new faculty member here at the University of Chicago in the Department of Classics as well as in the Divinity School. She's a professor of ancient Mediterranean religions and mythologies in the University of Divinity School. Her research focus is in a wide range of topics including comparative mythology, cultural exchange in the ancient Mediterranean world, exploring the ideas about myth and narratives and religious practices which act as loci for cultural exchanges and provide mechanisms for groups in close contact to negotiate tensions, adopt to change and bolster their resilience. She has an incredible publication record. I'm not going to go through all of the details but would like to just highlight some of the titles of some of the books that she has produced including ranging from the Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean, The Gods, Heroes and Monsters, a book of Greek, Roman and Near Eastern myths in translation, When the Gods Were Born, Greek Cosmogonies in the Near East, Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia, Phoenician, Greek and Indigenous Relations. I really want to single out however her recent book, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean. I suspect we're going to hear a little bit more about that topic this evening. To give you a little bit more flavor of some of the range of her scholarship reflected in articles ranging from titles like Local Experiences and Global Connections, Finding the Balance or the Resilience of a Non-People, The Case for a Reconstruction of Phoenician Identity, Knowledge Encounters with the Near Eastern World and Beyond. You can sense a theme here about intercultural connections and particularly between the classical or Aegean world, the Greek world and the Near East. This is a very important, obviously from the Isaac perspective of her research. One more, A Perilous Sailing and a Lion, Comparative Evidence for a Phoenician Afterlife Motif, published in the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions. I could go on. There's an incredible range of scholarship and subject matter, a very distinguished scholar. We're really privileged to have Carolina both at the University of Chicago and giving us a talk this evening. I'm going to struggle to pronounce the name of the site, probably best just to refer to Malaga, but she is perhaps known best to many in the room as the co-director of the ongoing excavation project there, working collaboratively with David Shlone, professor here in Isaac. So please welcome, join me in welcoming Carolina this evening. She's going to talk about the Phoenicians, the Phoenicians strike back. Please join me in welcoming Carolina. Thank you for the invitation. I'm really honored to speak in this halls in which I've listened to a lot of lectures as a student, as now as faculty. I also thank you for coming here because I know at this place there's always a lot of other things you could be doing at any given time. So I am going to be talking about the Phoenicians kind of generally, kind of give you context, tell you some things about my research, about why I think they're so fascinating and important as an object of study. And then I will zoom in into the archaeological project that Tim Harrison mentioned, that I lead with Professor David Shlone here and colleagues from Malaga. So I'm more or less, it might be half and half, I'm not sure, depends how the PowerPoint goes. There are a lot of slides so I will try to time it right. And then feel free to ask me questions either here or at the reception or send me an email if you don't get to or anything. I'm always happy to talk about Phoenicians. So who are the Phoenicians and why should we study them? Everybody should study the Phoenicians, according to me, obviously. Well, okay, very briefly just to situate in case somebody or anybody doesn't know their background, basically we're talking about Northwest Semitic-speaking people from the coast of today's Lebanon, Northern Israel, Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, are names that resound, right, in the history of the Phoenicians, in many sources, from biblical to classical sources. And as you can see in these maps, one of several maps I'm going to show you, in the green areas, actually they kind of get very short of the areas where the Phoenicians settled, but it gives you an indication of their roots, the extent of the Mediterranean, and basically the Phoenicians knitted the first truly interconnected Pan-Mediterranean network based on trading networks and trading posts, but also small settlements, some of which became larger, such as most famously Carthage in today's Tunisia. You can see there Carthage, Utica, right, they also settled in parts of Western Sicily, Western Sardinia, and Southern Spain, and most of the coast of North Africa, going all the way to the Atlantic, and even the coast of Portugal. I'll show you another map that shows that better. So they're great objects of study for the Iron Age, especially that's when they appear in the stage of Mediterranean history, around the turn of the first millennium BCE, is when our sources start talking about these people and their maritime enterprise, first with the Hebrew Bible and the Assyrian sources, and then later on with Homer, the Greek sources also talk about them. So they extend these networks and they interact with so many people, so many proto-urban, you know, archaic period groups, such as the Greeks at this time, such as the Etruscans, Sardinians, and people from Iberia, and North Africa, and so on, Israel as well. So they really are great to study the topic of cultural exchange, cultural contact. In that sense, they also provide an interesting frame for my other area of work, which is comparative mythology and literatures, especially Greek and Near Eastern interaction, as teased out in mythological themes, and one of the questions driving my scholarship is to what degree did this contact with Phoenicians in particular, and Levantines more general, shape the Near Eastern, the reception of Near Eastern culture and literature and mythology in Ancient Greece. But today I will focus more on archaeology and material culture. They're also very interesting because they provide a kind of an alternative view of the Mediterranean, almost like from the southern part of it, that is a counterpoint to the, you know, the more traditional Hellenocentric and classicocentric and Eurocentric perspective of the Mediterranean. The goal, of course, is to integrate all of that, and there is no, you know, it shouldn't be like a dichotomy, right? And then, for the last point, it's also interesting that their activity and their presence is not always linked to colonization, so we know that they are very active and living in small groups, pockets, trading posts, enclaves, where they are integrated in places, say in the Aegean or in Italy, where they are not setting a colony. In other places they are setting a colony, meaning a fuller-grown settlement that they govern in some way, but in other contexts they are not. So, basically, they are very flexible, they provide a very flexible model of interaction and activity that is not imperial, it is colonial in some areas, but what kind of colonial, you know, it's kind of complex and it's not rigid in that way. So, how did they manage to do this and to for so many centuries, really, you know, without much problem until they ran against the Roman's interest? That's a big question. So, some of the challenges about the study of definitions are that, well, they fall between disciplines, in the sense my own work represents that falling between disciplines and attempt to unite these disciplines. So, classics, you know, historians who work on the Punic Wars, especially, or on Greek history, sometimes work on definitions, people who work on Hebrew Bible or on Assyrian sources sometimes work on definitions, ancient Near Eastern historians, and then, of course, Syrian-Palestinian archaeology, they are part of that field, they are part of the field of Western Mediterranean archaeology of the Iron Age, when you move to the West, but that scholarship in the Far West and in the Near East doesn't always interact or communicate very well, because they really belong to different disciplines, right? Near Eastern archaeology and Western Mediterranean archaeology, the methodologies are sometimes different, their approaches, so that's part of what I and others, you know, try to do, to kind of link the dots. And then, the other big problem is how much they are mediated by other cultures' sources. So, we do have thousands of Phoenician inscriptions, but we have very few literary sources that we can call Phoenician, we have some, mostly in Greek from later periods, but they're also, most of the information we have about the Phoenicians for the early period comes from other sources, be Greek, later Roman, or again Assyrian or Biblical, right? So, there is a problem of how to reconstruct their culture from within, and being fair to their own image of themselves, because we don't really know what the image of themselves was in that way, in the way that we can work with other groups, other cultures, even though that's always a complex task, to try to reconstruct a group identity. So, because of that, there has been some work in recent decades or so, yeah, within the last decade, about questioning these issues and the idea of a Phoenician group identity, since we rely so much on other sources. So, works such as In Search of Definitions, kind of deconstructs the idea of definitions as a cohesive culture. So, I see that as a phase that any culture in has to go through, to then kind of be reconstructed in the same way that we reconstruct, to some degree, any other culture, always in a sort of artificial way, because it's always more complicated, but I think we can talk about definitions. In the end, we do. There's no way around language, and it's arbitrary in nature, right? We use names. So, we can talk about definitions, and this is just one possible way of describing them, as a seagoing, seafaring, very sea-oriented, Iron Age, a Canaanite group from the Lebanese coast and northern Israel, distinct from other Northwest Semitic groups, that's Hebrews, Arameans, and so on, mostly because of the gods they worship, their religion, their rituals, their maritime orientation, and a set of skills that are very prominent in their economy, and that are recognized by others, such as metallurgy, and luxury items, and crafts, certain crafts, but very importantly also because they share a language and a writing system that is peculiar and distinct to them, from a family of languages and scripts, but also peculiar. So, we can relax, we can talk about definitions in this sense, without needing to get into the weeds of who did they really think they were, or how do we define them further. But for those of you who like DNA studies, and with all the pitfalls that DNA studies can bring, I think it's just as a fun fact, I wanted to bring up these two cases of so-called Bir Saman, on the left, looking very peaceful, and Matan, from Gadir in Spain, looking not so peaceful, whose skeletons were studied for DNA traits, and also to reconstruct their faces, and they both happen to be from the same period, the 6th century BCE, when we have so many settlements, and cemeteries, and everything. So, not surprisingly, just to bring up a kind of a fun fact, the studies, again, without getting into the weeds of how to read those studies, but the studies show, or argue, that in both cases you have a type of DNA strand that goes back to what you would expect from the Near East, like what is attested in remains from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and so on, in both cases. And another strand, especially the mitochondrial DNA in the case of Matan, which is the maternal DNA, shows a strong affinity with Western Mediterranean, Western European type of DNA, which is not surprising at all, that, you know, Iberian stock, or whatever it was. So, that is precisely what you might expect from anybody, you know, in groups that are moving around the Mediterranean, that they, you know, the DNA can show they are part of a migration, but they're also integrated in the place where they're living, because these settlements grow by mixing with local population. So, whatever the merits of these particular studies, just to say that in the end it doesn't matter, because these people didn't know what their DNA was, the same way that, I don't know, a Greek-American might not know what their DNA is, and they have an identity shaped by the community in which they live, their family, their perception of their family history, the religion they practice, the language they speak, and so on and so forth. So, for all we know, Matan and our friend here from Birsa were as Phoenician as anybody in their community, or they might have known that part of their family was from a local group that was more different than others, or we cannot know. But it's just what you might expect. So, definitions strike back, and by that I meant that I feel like there has been a surge of Phoenician studies, not only in archaeology, which had never really stopped, but in terms of historical studies and the prominence that they take in books and museum exhibits and all kinds of things. This is just one sample, one of them produced here. They connected Iron Age by our So, there is a surge in protagonism, especially because they have a big place, a big role to play in areas such as Mediterranean studies, which is by itself, like Mediterranean history as a thing, it has become a whole field. You can think of the Corrupting Sea and all those sorts of books. Also in Iron Age archaeology in general, and then also in art historical studies about this particular art produced in the early first millennium, all across the Levant and the Mediterranean, the so-called orientalizing phenomenon, that even though it's a very unpopular nomenclature, orientalizing, it's still used, so I'm going to use it until we find a better one. But just to define it, what I did in my book of definitions and the making of the Mediterranean, what I tried to do was to kind of integrate historical and archaeological data narratives and what we know about where definitions were settled, try to integrate that with this wave of orientalizing, quote-unquote, adaptations that many local groups implemented, let's say. So, in Greece, in Etruria, in Sicily, Sardinia, in southern Spain, in the Levant itself, in Anatolia, you have this phenomenon of kind of an influence or an inflection of Levantine style art and symbology and crafts and technologies that, in my argument, map very well with the presence and intense activity of definitions. Again, not only of definitions, as I make clear, I'm not saying that they were responsible for everything, but emphasizing that they provided a very strong channel for this phenomenon. So, I call that the orientalizing kit, defending that it's a vague enough term that, in fact, it's so vague and kind of wrong in a sense because the orient is not a thing, right? But that, in a sense, it can be positively taken to reflect kind of a cultural wave whereby the locals who were adapting these things did not necessarily know where these trends were coming from or where these artifacts were coming from, but they would have encountered them via definitions. So, that's kind of a definition that I made, that definitions profited from the export of a modifiable package of Levantine style goods and cultural capital, which constituted the basis of what we call the orientalizing kit. And in this way, many of these proto-urban cultures became interconnected also by a visual and by a visual language that they adopted. I'm gonna run very fast through these slides to just show you what the type of art that I'm talking about. I'm not gonna stop in there, but, you know, decoration in what is called orientalizing or proto-Corinthian or archaic, depending on the place, archaeocipriot or truscan archaic pottery or whatever, sphinxes, animals, a lot of the type of decoration that was already part of the Canaanite and Phoenician repertoire in other art forms. Ivories, and you will see a recurring theme of symbolic elements such as the sphinxes, the lotus flowers, the mistress of animals, all these kinds of things existed in Canaanite culture and my argument is that definitions as Canaanites that they were are the ones that kind of sold, let's say, and provided models to be adapted in different ways that already had this synthesis of Egyptian-looking and Assyrian-looking and Syrian-looking elements that were already synthesized in Canaanite culture, such as in the image of the sphinx or in the motif of the volute capital or the volute regenerative palm or, you know, tree of life and all those sorts of elements that appear all over the place or the kind of hieratic statue that we see also in the Mediterranean. Every one of these things is like a whole topic. There's a lot of discussion behind any of this and I have made some incursions in these art historical topics, partnering sometimes with art historians because these are kind of difficult topics. Another famous area is the writing system that I mentioned before that spread to Greece, of course, and to Etruria, to the Levant, Israel, Amman, Jordan, like all these definition alphabets that was a version of an earlier Canaanite alphabet. They are the ones who kind of standardized it and that is the alphabet that is spread in the Despite that fact, it turns out that, again, paradoxically, we have very little by means of Phoenician literature. I wrote a synthesis of what we do have or the genres, the kinds of genres that others, authors, Greeks and Romans talk about, telling us that definitions were known for these types of writing. Travel literature, even possible connections with pre-Socratic philosophy and cosmogony and so on, but also navigation, agricultural treatises, politics, law, possibly, Carthage. The Carthaginian constitution was very well known by Aristotle and so on. So it is very tragic and dramatic that we have lost all that and we owe that to the Romans who destroyed Carthage. Of course, those Romans destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE, same year that they destroyed Corinth, but as I used to say, as I always say, the outcomes of those destructions were kind of opposite. They destroyed Corinth in the same year, but they adopted Greek culture and literature and cherished it, like their own, whereas for Carthage, they dismantled their library, they gave it away and they tried to do their best to kind of bury the Carthaginian, which is Phoenician, heritage as much as they could, because they were, you know, mortal rivals. So, big question, how do they manage to build and sustain for centuries such an expansive network, again from, I'm talking about from the 9th century BCE to, well, to the 2nd century, well, the 3rd century, let's be fair, the Punic Wars, that was pretty much it. The 3rd century BCE, by 500 BCE, they really clashed, came into competition with Rome or Rome came into competition with them in the Western Mediterranean and that's what led to the Punic Wars. But before that, the interesting thing is that we have this huge network that is, again, not apparently centralized in any way that we can know for sure, we don't know how these cities were connected, we know they were connected by trade and we see that in a lot of the material culture, and there are some sources that talk about the connection between Gadir here, Cadiz, and Tyre, in terms of religion, the cult of Melkart and Heracles slash Melkart, the Gadmelkart became synthesized with Heracles, so they have these famous temples of Dadga, there was a connection between Carthage and Tyre, there are foundation stories about these cities being founded by Tyre, so there is a symbolic connection across the Phoenician Oikumene, but it is kind of, there is a lot still to be learned and interpreted about how it worked exactly, and what was the role of the mother cities in this diaspora, how long did it last, how much of a grip did they have in these colonies, if any, what was going on in that way. So the case of Iberia, we're getting closer, it's a very interesting one because, well, A, there is a lot of settlements, there are a lot of archaeological sites and a lot of work being done for this period, and also the contact with this local group that we call Tartessos is pretty well attested, not necessarily totally understood yet, but we know there was this, let's say, Bronze Age European type local culture that came into contact with the Phoenicians and then became much more visible, so that's the area of Tartessos, here you have the colony of Tyre, Gadir, sorry, and then pay attention to this, I will show you a close-up of this, so there's Seville around here, Cordova is around here, so this is the Guadalquivir valley, which is a very fertile valley, and all along the coast we have Phoenician settlements, our Malaga settlement, this keeps happening, is around here, and these are the Straits of Gibraltar, which are very difficult to cross, and the Phoenicians clearly knew how to do it, and they banked on that, and they took an advantage over other people by trading with this group very early on, so we know about the Tartessic culture, that they were very rich in metals, they were exploiting metals since earlier on, but then when the Phoenicians arrived, their culture kind of explodes in terms of technology, of metal extraction, metal like filigree and granulation, all these techniques that they apply to their jewelry, they start building sanctuaries, such as this one, which may be Tartessic, may be Phoenician, there's a statue of Astarte found around there with a Phoenician inscription, there's some debate about what it is, but also the quote-unquote orientalizing influence reaches very far inland, and we have sites like Cancho Roano and others that present very clear Levantine style architecture and structures and material culture, even in the 5th century and the 4th century BCE, so there's an impact of this Levantine culture that stays in and kind of penetrates the local culture until much later. So, what were they doing in this area? One interesting fact, obviously, is the metal resources, so the area of Huelva, which is around here, this is the gulf that I pointed before, is one of the richest concentrations of metals in the world, apparently, these are the Rio Tinto mines, they were exploited until now, but especially until the 19th century, I think, during Roman times as well, and so on. This area is like Mars, it's called Rio Tinto, like Red River, for a reason, which is, it looks like this, if you go there, you're thinking you're in a different planet, and it's because of the metals, especially the iron, but they have silver, iron, tin, copper, a lot of stuff. So, the Phoenicians knew what they were doing, and they came here very early, but here you have a concentration of sites that are more like local driven, like marked by local pottery, that is indigenous handmade pottery, indigenous style metalwork, and so on, then they become orientalizing, they start producing materials that are more Levantine-like, but the Phoenicians don't set a colony here. However, there are Phoenician materials here in Huelva, even burials, but not like a settlement. That, to me, means that this community was strong enough that they were not taking any, they were not letting them settle there, but they were giving them access to their mineral resources, and so on. So, there is a partnership, we don't know with how much pressure or violence or not, there is no indication of colonization in that way. However, the Phoenicians decide to settle here in Cadiz, right? So, they're, sorry, this keeps moving, they are at the other side of the, so here's Huelva, here is the entrance of the Guadalquivir Valley, which nowadays is silted, like this is the Doñana Park, if anybody likes birds, famous birding marshes, right? But in antiquity, we know, and also from prospections, archaeological prospections, that this was, in fact, as the sources say, a gulf, and it was open, which means it explains why there are so many sites along this, what was the gulf. There are many Iron Age sites, local and with a lot of Phoenician materials as well, all the way up to Seville, which is somewhere here. So, there is some sort of divide where you see the kind of the local stronghold, that is my interpretation at least, and that of a lot of scholars, and then they settle closer to the straits here in Cadiz, and here's where they, you have a concentration of Phoenician, of a Phoenician city, and there's where you get one of the earliest Phoenician settlements, this is not our site, but what lies under the city of Cadiz nowadays, which is a very impressive block, it's not more than, it's just a block, it's an emergency excavation under a theater, but in that block, they have found the, you know, the earliest stratum of the foundation of Cadiz, which goes back to the late 9th century BCE. So, there's an interesting discussion about the chronology, because every time something else is discovered, and there's some carbon 14 done, and this and that, and pottery compared between tires pottery and Phoenician pottery here, it seems every now, you know, it confirms the early presence in full-fledged mode of urbanization of the Phoenicians in this area, which for, I say this because for a long time, people were very skeptical that the sources were right, they were pointing to the late 9th century foundation of Carthage is 418, no, sorry, 814, 814 BCE in the sources, and nobody believed that, because they hadn't found that, but now there are plenty of sites that go back to this time, and this is just a map of, again, to situate you where we are, here is Huelva and Cadiz on the other side of the gulf, and here at this, on this side of the straits is where Málaga is, with these two sites that we are, have been engaging with, Cerro del Villar is where that big dot is, but also, more importantly, there is another little site just inland from it, just a little bit farther inland, that is even earlier, and shows that earlier phase of contact with the locals in the late 9th century, so let's move on to the Cerro del Villar before I run out of time, and show you very quickly some of what has been going on there, and why this site is so important, but I have to mention the collaboration with our colleagues from Málaga, the University of Málaga, this is really a huge collaboration project, here you have both teams, and my co-director, Professor David Sloan, who is here, and our PI, Professor José Suárez Padilla, from the University of Málaga, besides other colleagues from Málaga, and from all over Spain, and from Germany, and from other places, who are doing something or other related to the project, he has really brought together a lot of experts in many areas, but let's say our two teams are the ones that are digging, I have to show my guys from last summer, some of whom are here, in this very nice photo of the Chicago team, and this photo, which is so much more fun, I will pass quickly, so the Cerro del Villar is in the bay of Málaga, here is the city of Málaga today, and just outside of the city, of today's city, in one of the mouth, in the mouth of one of the rivers, the Guadaljorce, there was this larger gulf, again that has been silted, and our site was here, one little island, one of several little islands in this mouth, the earlier site was here, but excavations were very fast, because the site is under the airport, but it was enough to see that there was an earlier phase of contact, and an earlier phase of even building, we don't know building what, if it was a site, a settlement, or a sanctuary, some people think, I will pass over the history of the site kind of quickly, though just to show you here, you can see the shape of the island, now all of this is land, you will see a photo, the river is channeled, canalized very strictly, because this is very important, this river, as many Mediterranean like dry climate rivers, is tiny, but it's kind of a seasonal river, so when it rains, it pours, and then there's not enough, you know, moist and vegetation to hold to the water, so it floods, and that happens in a lot of Mediterranean places, right, so we'll get to that, and this is the airport excavation of the other sites further inland, and now the site is under runway number three, I think, right, this is very sad, but anyway, perhaps one day they'll decide to repave it, and we'll just go right there, but just to show you the variety of things that would come up in this sort of place, you have Greek geometric pottery, and you have, I think this is a Sardinian type of pot, and typical red slipware jug, I'm not sure what this is, sculpture, and transport jugs, and so on, so it's the kind of thing that also allows you to compare with chronology, right, like geometric pottery is pretty well dated, though still a bit debated sometimes, and you can then, that also helps date things, this is a map of the site where it is nowadays, with this area marked up, you know, digitally, so you can see, and these are the excavations, this is where we have been, well, we have been digging around here, but all of this is like, what, eight hectares of terrain, miraculously in southern coastal Spain, not built over. Why? Well, in part because the area floods, and it still floods, so it's not good. The Phoenicians, for once, maybe not once, maybe other times, did not choose too well, so they stayed here for about two centuries, and then they left, and when they left, they probably moved to where Malaga is now, because that's when Malaga starts getting built up, and we have bigger defensive walls and more materials there, so we think that this is kind of the proto-Malaga, perhaps. So the area is slightly elevated, but not very, and then now it's a protected area for bird nesting and stuff like that, which is great, because it's not built over. You can think of the prototype of the Phoenician settlement at the mouth, again, at the mouth of an estuary in archipelago mode, here is a digitally retouched map of a photo of Cadiz. Nowadays, this is not a real channel, but analysis of the soil and so on has detected that this was most likely a channel between these two islands. This is a reconstruction of Tyre, so you have Cadiz here, Cadiz today, to get an idea, but these were separate islands, so the comparison with Tyre is great, and many other sites of the Phoenicians, like Mozia, I mean there's just a lot of them, or peninsulas like Carthage, that's a typical MO, so the colony almost mirroring the mother city, and then all sorts of studies can be done nowadays with archaeological analysis, like lab work, which is amazing, so in one of the studies of the seeds and soil and so on, shows this analysis from my colleague from Malaga also, Manuel Alvarez, the colony dominated a hinterland that produced a significant volume of cereals, 64%, legumes, vines and olives, Mediterranean diet, right, in fields far from the site and probably in the hands of the indigenous population. It is estimated that the site may have controlled a resource collection radius of around 18 kilometers, focused on the lower and middle course of the Guadalhorce River, the little river, that's just from analyzing the type of products you get, so we're hoping to do much more of that. In the early excavations in the 1990s, the site was excavated, and just like 5%, maybe 10% at most, but enough to see that it was a fully urbanized area. This is a reconstruction of the so-called commercial street that they excavated then, dated to the early 8th century BC, which is when we think the settlement starts, and you have the typical, you know, rectilinear streets, I mean houses around streets, where you have a combination of workshops and metalworking installations, and pottery production installations, and market, and houses, probably houses serving several purposes, like with one floor, the lower floor as the commercial one, and the upper floor for the houses, and so on. So this is very exciting because now we are actually excavating just west of this, and kind of expanding on this commercial area, and here's some of the things they found to support what I just said. Their reading of the site as a commercial and metallurgical activity, some weights marked with the sheen for shekel, right, two years for metal production, and ovens in another area close to this area. They found this Tanur-style oven that are exactly like those found in Sarepta and other sites in Lebanon from the same period. So again, they are transporting some areas of their technology just exactly like they know how to do, they have the know-how to make all this production in a different place, and at the same time, very soon, you have new types of pottery, and new costumes, new food perhaps, who knows about clothing or anything else, as they mix with the local population, you'll have some transformation. So that's what we want to study. In the 90s, they excavated an area that was alongside the river, but I want to move on. One of our colleagues did this very cool digital modelling of house two, which is great, and he also made the interior and exterior and so on. And then, to move forward, how these current excavations started was, very briefly, via a study of this inundation issue that they had, that I mentioned. So our some colleagues from Aachen in Germany, who are experts in tsunamis and inundations, they planned this study of reopening one of the cuts, cut five, from the previous excavations, and doing a full study of the strata, of all the deposits, to try to ascertain what had happened with this inundation. So this was part of a project about extreme wave events in the western Mediterranean, and they found, and now they have published some of the data, they have found, actually, that it was true, what the original excavator proposed, that there was a very big layer of an inundation, which you can see here. This is the remains of an adobe wall, and she had said, Maria Eugenia Oved, that she thought that this was an inundation, maybe from the river, maybe from the sea. So now they have detected this, and actually another one over here, that they have dated them to the 7th century, one early 7th century, another in the late 7th century, so we know that at least there were two big inundations. They think one of them was from the river, mostly, and that the second one was from the sea. And it's incredible the amount of data that these studies can give you, as to the strength of the, how the water comes in, the timing, for how long, all kinds of stuff. So that's kind of how it started, and then we put together this larger project and said, okay, this place needs to be excavated again, and that's where we came in. Here you have a magnetometry of the site, where you can see that it's really very built up, and these are the areas where we dug last year, and this year we did a bit more here, and here the Spanish team, and here's our team. So just to show you a very few cool things from last year that speak about daily life, basically we're excavating foundations of houses, maybe houses slash workshops. We have not reached so many floors yet, we are kind of getting there to ascertain the function of the of the complexes, but there are some very cool things that connect the site to sea life, as you might expect of Phoenicians. So you have like a whole banquet of seashells, like a whole paella remain that somebody threw in there, more eggshells that were used to make a purple dye, famous production of the Phoenicians, a fisherman's hook, a piece of an anchor, a boat anchor, which is very cool, and corresponds with certain types that appear in the Levant and through the Phoenician world. And moving on to wrap up to the 2023 excavation, just to show you the awesome orthophoto that Andrew Wright made, and you can see that there are several layers going on, and this is part of, this is just west of the sector with the commercial street, actually the commercial street is here, somewhere around here. We think that some of these are, some of this area also has signs of a thermal installation or ovens. I'm just going to show you some pictures for fun to wrap it up, with some people that you know, there's so many more that you also know, but here's Marta who is right now in Iraq, in Nippur, and here's Charles, and you can see that, well, we made some probes to see how far down it goes, and it just keeps going, so we know that the 8th century layer is below here, and we're trying to still figure out how below and how to proceed, but here you can see the same, like there's another wall down here, and in this area, the commercial street is here, is where we think there's some good signs of ovens, like these are adobe walls of some kind of installation, and here is a piece of adobe, and some really awesome assemblages of pottery that Alison and Charles have been working on already in Malaga, and some of them kind of smashed against a wall, again, was it because of the inundation? Where is the inundation? We have to try to match our record in this part of the town with the record of the pit that was open, where they detected the inundation, and they gave it a dating and all, because it's in a different area, there's a bit of a slope, so we have to still figure out how everything matches, but this is very interesting, as is the bench, or whatever it is, where Kate here is lying, because this is an adobe thing, you can see here, that is under and kind of leaning against this wall, or this wall is leaning on it, or we don't know, so is it a bench? Is it another wall that was like an adobe wall on which another wall has been built? There's all sorts of theories, and we don't know yet, but you can see that there's really, first of all, it's a site where you dig, and you're right there, like you dig for 50 centimeters, and you're already digging the foundations of the upper level, and then you keep going, and there is a lot of material to go through. These are not the only aspects of the project, like for instance, there was another German team who were digging a fish salt fish installation, this is just like half of one of the pools, this is a huge installation of like 10 of these pools or more from late Roman times, and we were amazed at their very neat profiles that they had. There is some random things, like Hellenistic period jug, like what is it doing in a what we thought was a 7th century context, but it's kind of at the end, is that like brought up by the water, like they add some later period, which would mean this was some sort of beach, beaching area, or harbor area, a lot of stuff. So to finish, and with this, I just gave you a very, very sweeping overview, enough to, I hope to get your interest, but one of the fascinating questions, besides the larger question that I laid out about the mode of settlement, right, what is this network, how do they sustain the network, how is it connected to the Levant and to other parts of the network, but one of the fascinating things too is about the landscape, landscape archaeology, all these issues of sustainability that are so central in a lot of archaeological work. So as my colleague wrote this, the economic activity of the settlement may have partially contributed to the degradation of the immediate environment and the gradual process of flooding of the estuary. So if you're cutting trees like crazy to feed with wood, those ovens, and those metal installations, right, and do metal work, and build ships, and all kinds of things, you are degrading the landscape, and therefore when it rains, it will flood. So by the end of the 7th century, the island was on the verge of disappearing, surrounded by marshes and riverbeds in the midst of an inhospitable and hugely vulnerable landscape, and true enough, they picked up and left, and they left, and there was some pottery making activity for a while, like it was like an industrial area, which is what it is right now as well, interestingly, but definitely there is a lot to be learned here also in terms of these questions of how do they engage with the landscape, how did they transform the landscape, how did that affect their survival and their viability of their sites. So I'm gonna leave it there, only with a conclusion that Plato, well, Plato is quoted as saying that those who want a well-governed city ought to shun the sea as a teacher of vice, that is the idea of the corrupting sea, but actually that's from Plato's laws, who says that it is best not to be too close to the sea, but not to be too far from it, because a lot of new things come from the sea, that people, new people, new merchandise that can be kind of corrupting of your character. So anyway, I like to say that definitions are the most corrupting of peoples perhaps in the Mediterranean, but not for the worst, but for also a lot of, you know, a lot of good things that we are still learning about. Thank you.