11 - Before ‘the Gates of Tartessos’: Indigenous Knowledge and Exchange Networks in the Late Bronze Age Far West

Summary

Two main and opposing models have typically dominated the interpretation of the Phoenician Archaic colonisation phenomenon. The first one is a Marxist and Polanyian model, which maintains that Phoenician colonization was an enterprise conducted by the palace of Tyre and Gadir, its representative in the far west, whose main objectives were to disperse the excess population from the Levant, and to exploit the Tartessian territory by a workforce from the indigenous elites. The second one is agrarian model. This chapter presents evidence of people or imports such as wheelmade pottery, Aegean-type ship in the Laxe Auga dos Cervos Petroglyph, the SW Warrior stele, and local handmade stroke-burnished and painted pottery, in the Eastern Mediterranean before colonization. Wheelmade pottery is known in Later Bronze Age (LBA) pre-Phoenician contexts, which could be placed between the thirteenth and mid-ninth centuries BC in Iberia.