Earth architecture in the Phoenician and Punic world : from the Iron Age Levant to the Punic Western Mediterranean and beyond

The Phoenicians brought with them various cultural customs on their way to the West, which are reflected both in material culture and in architectural traditions and building techniques. The study of architectural features throughout the Punic West Mediterranean can undoubtedly be seen as an innovative approach taken by a young generation of scholars to identify all the processes of contact and cultural contamination that characterise the Mediterranean region of the first millennium BC. It is well known that material culture is not a static phenomenon and that in most cases it evolves and reinvents itself. This paper focuses on the evolutionary process of mud-brick architecture, which, although always considered an almost exclusive feature of Near Eastern architecture, is now well attested in the Western Mediterranean as well, thanks to several recent excavations. In Punic contexts, the use of mud-brick architecture can be traced back to the first contacts between the local populations of Sicily, North Africa, Sardinia, the Iberian Peninsula and the Levantine peoples. However, some differences in the use of this technique can be identified. In Sardinia, the architecture of raw clay merges with that of stone, leading to a new logic of settlement arrangement. In Andalusia, on the other hand, the architecture of unbaked clay maintains its peculiarities, but seems to change its dimensional system to meet a specific need. By analysing the unpublished documentation of Pani Loriga (Sardinia), Cerro Macareno (Spain) and Kharayeb (Lebanon), this paper analyses the impact of oriental mud-brick technology on local, regional building traditions and the changes in the construction methods of the different regions