Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 19.

1 (2006) 121-150
ISSN (Print) 0952-7648
ISSN (Online) 1743-1700

Past the Last Outpost: Punic Merchants in the Atlantic Ocean (5th–1st
centuries BC)

Alfredo González-Ruibal
Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94304, USA
E-mail: aruibal@stanford.edu

Abstract
Whereas the Punic presence in the Mediterranean is well-known and there is a large literature dealing
with the politics, economy and culture of the Punic colonies and factories, the Phoenician and Punic
presence in the Atlantic has received very little attention until recently. In this article, it is argued that,
by adopting a post-colonial perspective and by exploring a region that at least partially lay beyond the
effective control of Mediterranean sailors, we can obtain a different view both of Punic expansion, and
the modes of interaction between foreign merchants and local communities.
Keywords: Post-colonial theory, borderlands, ancient colonialism, trading diasporas, Phoenicians/
Punics, northwest Iberia.

Introduction: Margins and Postcolonialism culture was too impressive to be overlooked.

The aim of this paper is to explore the pres-
ence of Punic merchants in the Atlantic,
and particularly on the northwest coast of
Iberia, which was the remotest place where
those Mediterranean sailors conducted trade
directly without establishing formal colo-
nies or outposts. I propose a post-colonial
approach that deconstructs the image of the
merchants as the ones in control. I will point
to their insecurities and stress the negotiated
character of their intercourse with locals.
Until very recently Greeks and Phoeni-
cians were invariably portrayed as the main
characters in a twofold history of colonial
domination, in which diverse native groups
provided an inconspicuous and submissive
background (Malkin 2004: 358). This situ-
ation has been especially true in the case of
the Phoenician colonization (van Dommelen
1997: 308)—perhaps with the exception of
southern Iberia, where the local Orientalizing
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
The sites that have been excavated help to
support the image of the all-powerful: Greek
or Phoenician towns, wrecks, cemeteries and
sanctuaries in deeply ‘Mediterraneanized’
regions (Morris 2003) attract the attention of
Classical archaeologists, who have tradition-
ally ignored indigenous settlements. Therefore,
instead of minorities of colonists surrounded
by a mass of (more or less) controlled natives
with whom they have to mediate, we only see
the unhindered power and agency of Greeks,
Phoenicians or Punics.1 The case that I study
in this article addresses a different situation:
instead of the well-trodden paths of the Medi-
terranean, I will explore remoter areas, where
Mediterranean rules may not apply.
The study of margins can be considered a
post-colonial undertaking, but also a post-
modern one: notions of deterritorialization,
re-territoralization, borderlands and marginal-
ity are central to the renewed post-modern
122 González-Ruibal
interest in space (Gupta and Ferguson 2002:
65; see also Clifford 1997). Usually, ancient
sources and modern historians alike transmit
an image of the dominant and confident trav-
eller, who feels at ease sailing unknown seas,
occupying new spaces, meeting strange people
and transforming the other into the same. To
be sure, colonists are also affected by isola-
tion, fear, a sense of loss and disorientation,
but these feelings are usually cloaked under a
rhetoric of success and power, as Hall (2000)
has aptly described in modern colonialism.
Homi Bhabha (1994) has emphasized insecu-
rity, vulnerability and the unfulfilled desire for
fixity and control as some of the key aspects to
understanding colonialism. He thinks that ‘the
conflict between pleasure/unpleasure, mastery/
defence, knowledge/disavowal, absence/pres-
ence, has a fundamental significance for colo-
nial discourse’ (Bhabha 1994: 75).
The theoretical advantage of marginality
is that things are even less fixed and stable
than at the center. Borders, despite being
sometimes very physically marked, are fluid: if
colonial practice and representation are char-
acterized by ambivalence and uncertainty,
as Bhabha (1994) reminds us, this should be
all the more obvious in those places where
the fixedness of a colonial discourse is a mere
matter of desire. According to Malkin (2004:
357, emphasis added) ‘it is the inability to
dictate, that is, the lack of hegemonic control
over vast territories, that lies at the heart of
the colonial experience’. For this reason, I
think that we should pay even more attention
to fringe situations: encounters beyond the
borderlines, places where the imperial rule
does not apply, marginal peoples, things that
lie at the interstices of global connectedness.
‘Trading diasporas’ (Curtin 1984: 15-59), such
as the one explored in this article, may also be
considered a fringe phenomenon, a mixture
between colonialism and seasonal emigra-
tion. Some historical studies have already
demonstrated the more negotiated character
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
of colonial encounters on the borderline. Far
from the metropolis, contact with local popu-
lations is characterized more by negotiation
and mediation than by domination (Malkin
2004: 356). The concept of ‘middle ground’
(White 1991; Malkin 2002; Gosden 2004)
suitably conveys the nature of these contacts.
From this point of view, the extreme places
of the Atlantic façade in the 1st millennium
BC may be very telling. Unlike in the Medi-
terranean, the merchants there were not in a
position of power that allowed them to dic-
tate the rules. Ambivalence—the impossibil-
ity of fixed stereotypes and a discourse without
challenge—is more obvious in a place where
foreigners do not rule. Besides, the idea that
colonial power is ‘… inevitable, indeed natu-
ral, that the colonizing side would prevail over
its “native’’ ’ (van Dommelen 1997: 308), can
be subject to criticism. Finally, the ‘profound
colonial divide’ (van Dommelen 1997: 308) is
inevitably less clear and the contact situation
more ambiguous and murky, to use van Dom-
melen’s terms, which resonate with Bhabha’s
concept of ambivalence. This is related to
the way colonists cope with otherness. In this
regard, I will also draw upon Said’s (2001:
58-59) concept of the ‘median category’, a
category ‘that allows one to see new things,
things for the first time, as versions of a pre-
viously known thing’. Said considered this
‘a method of controlling what seems to be a
threat to some established view of things’.
The use of post-colonial theory for ancient
contexts is risky. Post-colonial critique was
developed as a way of dealing with the par-
ticular colonialism of the 19th and 20th
centuries and its outcomes. This colonialism
was characterized by a high degree of con-
trol, vast territorial conquests, a strong belief
in biological racism and an absolute confi-
dence in the superiority of (Western) progress
and religion, all of which are absent in the
ancient world (cf. Malkin 2004), even if there
existed violence, dispossession and oppression

of other kinds. Archaic Greeks, Phoenicians
and Romans were much more flexible in
accepting difference than European colonists
were—the Greeks much less so after the 4th
century BC (Malkin 2004: 345). After all, one
of the first enunciations of cultural relativism
is that of Cornelius Nepos (De Viris Illustribus
Praef. 1-3), in the mid-2nd century BC, when
he complained about the Romans who only
find appropriate ‘what fits their customs’, and
argued that ‘the honest and the shameful are
not the same for everybody, but everything
has to be judged according to what one’s own
ancestors established.’ Punic people intermar-
ried with locals—Hannibal himself married
an Iberian woman (Livy 24.41, 7), while the
spread of citizenship in the Roman empire was
simply inconceivable in more recent contexts:
‘There was imperialism, for sure,’ says Claudia
Moatti (1997: 268), ‘but also an unparalleled
ability to absorb the other, to appropriate it,
and at the same time to be the other; an atti-
tude that is illustrated over all in the easiness
with which Roman citizenship has been given
to foreign populations throughout its history.’
Veyne (1991: 427), however, reminds us that
‘a human group adopts the values of a foreign
culture if, after its conversion, they are not
relegated to the last place in that culture… A
Lycian or an African tribe that became urban-
ized was not relegated to the last place of the
imperial society; on the contrary, it became
one of the constitutive cells of the world cul-
ture of their time.’
A Congolese in the late 19th century
had not the slightest chance of becoming a
Belgian, and a Belgian would be less than
inclined to adopt any element of Kuba culture.
The experience of being colonized or coming
into contact with another more powerful and
expansive society was, therefore, quite differ-
ent in the 1st millennium BC than it was 2,000
years afterwards. Nevertheless, affinities are
not lacking either: after all, both ancient and
recent colonialism implies ‘the presence of one
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Past the Last Outpost 123
or more groups of foreign people in a region at
some distance from their place of origin (the
“colonizers”) and the existence of asymmetri-
cal socio-economic relationships of domina-
tion or exploitation between the colonizing
groups and the inhabitants of the colonized
region’ (van Dommelen 1997: 306). Used
with broad-mindedness, post-colonial con-
cepts—such as those of ‘ambivalence’ and the
‘median category’ already mentioned—might
be very useful for rethinking the past (see also
van Dommelen 1997; 1998; 2002; Gosden
2004; Malkin 2004). From another point of
view, post-colonial theory may help us to get
rid of our own colonial prejudices, derived
from our most recent history, and to try to find
alternative insights into the relations between
colonists and local populations.
Extreme Places: Exploring the Far West
The debate on ancient colonialism has
remained largely confined to those areas
where ‘Mediterraneanization’ (Morris 2003)
was most obviously at play. I find Morris’s con-
cept apt and useful: as opposed to static and
timeless Mediterraneanism, the new approach
emphasizes processes, diversity, conflict and
different degrees of integration and connect-
edness through time, with different social and
political outcomes.
‘Mediterranean’ is a tricky concept, espe-
cially when understood in cultural terms. By
Mediterranean I refer to something or some-
body whose cultural references are originally
rooted in the Mediterranean basin, sometimes
strongly so (e.g. Semitic languages and dei-
ties), sometimes loosely (e.g. pottery or dress
styles). By the second half of the 1st millen-
nium BC, Mediterranean communities shared
a hybrid assemblage of cultural elements that
originated in a variety of places, including the
Levant, Greece, Italy and northern Africa.
These cultural elements spread beyond the
Mediterranean basin itself with the emigration
124 González-Ruibal
of colonists and, thence, we can talk about
the ‘Mediterraneanization’ of the Black Sea
or southern Portugal. To be sure, these areas
were not simply passive receptors of artefacts
and ideas from Mediterranean metropolises,
but also gave rise to new elements. A Punic
Mañá-Pascual A4 amphora (5th–3rd century
BC), however, produced in the area around
the Straight of Gibraltar (López Castro 1995:
64-67), can be considered ultimately Mediter-
ranean, because it evolved from eastern Phoe-
nician models, and both function and concept
can be traced back to a Mediterranean source,
certainly not to a local Atlantic background.
The same can be said of the black-glaze pot-
tery produced in Gadir and distributed in the
Atlantic (Niveau de Villedary 2000), which
draws upon a Greek tradition.
In a sense, then, the Punic Atlantic was
a self-contained world, with strong internal
connections, and less direct relations with
the Mediterranean, as Arruda (2001: 81-82)
has pointed out for southern Portugal. Even
if Punic towns were somewhat multi-cultural
communities, which included natives and peo-
ple from other parts of the Mediterranean, the
actual existence of distinct Punic colonists
and the links with the Mediterranean are
demonstrated in the survival of a Semitic lan-
guage well into Roman times (López Castro
1995: 218-19) and by the textual references
(e.g. Pseudo-Scylax) to empória Karchedoníon
(‘Carthaginian trading posts’) beyond the
Straight of Gibraltar.
We know that Mediterranean sailors in the
mid-1st millennium BC were travelling to very
distant places, probably as far as sub-Saha-
ran Africa and northwestern Europe (Lancel
1992: 119-26; Cunliffe 2001). Well-known
are the circumnavigation of Africa under the
sponsorship of Pharaoh Necho II around 600
BC (Herodotus 4.42); Hanno’s journey along
the Moroccan coast (Lipinski 2004: 444-76),
in the early 5th century BC; and the voyage of
Himilco to Atlantic Europe at a similar date.
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
However, the Mediterranean presence in the
Atlantic has drawn very little attention from
historians or archaeologists. Significantly, M.
Eugenia Aubet’s superb book on the Phoeni-
cian expansion devotes only 12 pages to the
Phoenician presence in Portugal and Morocco
(Aubet 2001: 291-304).
Nonetheless, recent work in the Atlantic
(Tavares 2001; López Pardo 2002; Arruda
2002) along the shores of Morocco, Portugal
and Spain, is providing a context for the
more extreme explorations of the Phoeni-
cians and Punics. With regard to Africa, the
attempt to confirm the Periplus of Hanno
archaeologically has benefited from research
since the 1950s. The northwestern coast of
Morocco, which is mentioned in the Periplus,
is well-known nowadays, and its ‘Mediter-
raneanization’ has proved to be profound
(Ponsich 1982)—as shown by the existence
of important Phoenician/Punic sites, such as
Lixus (Aranegui 2001). This town, located in
a characteristically Phoenician setting on a
promontory surrounded by the Loukkos river
mouth, has been excavated since the 1950s
and has yielded evidence of uninterrupted
Phoenician occupation from at least the 8th
century BC to the 1st century AD. The most
important feature is a renowned temple to
Hercules/Melqart that minted coins in Punic
times (López Pardo 1992b).
Yet we also have some information on the
furthest Phoenician/Punic outposts, 1,000
km away from Gibraltar (Figure 1). We
know that Hanno founded a post on a small
island called Cerne (Periplus 398, 55v, 40).
This is probably the little island of Moga-
dor, off modern Essaouira and well down
the Moroccan Atlantic coast (López Pardo
1991; Euzennat 1994: 578). This place is the
southernmost Phoenician settlement archae-
ologically known to date (López Pardo 1992a;
Euzennat 1994: 573-76), whereas Cerne is
the furthest trading post of the Carthaginians
on the west African coast mentioned by any

ancient writer (Lipinski 2004: 463). Punic
elements that might be related to Hanno’s
presence, however, are scarce—a few ampho-
ras and elephant tusks (López Pardo 1992a:
289, n. 35), as opposed to the abundant evi-
dence for Phoenician activity (7th century
BC). Punic materials, in general, are scarce
in Morocco between the 5th and 3rd centu-
ries BC (Mederos 1999), a fact that has been
attributed to the attacks of nomads (López
Pardo 2000: 225). This marginal area proba-
bly provided ivory, skins of domestic and wild
animals, and other products (probably gold)
to the Phoenician/Punic traders (Pseudo-Scy-
lax §112). Moroccan ivory has actually been
discovered in a Phoenician wreck in southern
Spain (López Pardo 1992a: 291, figs. 6-7).
Figure 1. The most important Phoenician/Punic towns in Morocco: 1. Tinga 2. Septem Fratres 3. Tamuda 4. Melilla
5. Zili 6. Kuass 7. Lixus 8. Banasa 9. Thamusida 10. Sala 11. Volubilis 12. Essaouira.
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Past the Last Outpost 125
Unfortunately, we know almost nothing
about these ‘Ethiopians’ that the Periplus
and Pseudo-Scylax mention. Archaeological
research in indigenous sites—as opposed to
Punic settlements—in pre-Roman Morocco
has scarcely been developed (cf. bibliography
in López Pardo 1991; 2002). Needless to say,
the nature of the interaction between sailors
and locals (if there ever was such) beyond
Mogador is completely unknown and has
received very little attention. A survey in
the 1970s discovered no Phoenician or Punic
remains at all in the area south of Essaouira
(Euzennat 1994: 568-69, fig. 4); but it has
been argued, from scant archaeological evi-
dence, that Punic sailors knew the Canary
Islands (Mederos and Escribano 1999).
126 González-Ruibal
The Punic and Greek expeditions to the
northern Atlantic, such as those of Pytheas,
Eutimenes of Massalia and Himilco, endowed
the Mediterranean peoples with a better
knowledge of the metal resources of the area.
In Himilco’s case, the travel can be related to
a new desire on the part of Carthage for seiz-
ing the western resources and perhaps also for
counter-balancing the Greek encroachment
on the Levantine coast of Spain (Frankenstein
1997: 276). References to Himilco’s travel are
few and short. The earliest one is Pliny, in the
mid-1st century AD (Naturalis Historia 2.169.4),
who says that Himilco was dispatched to get to
know the outer coasts of Europe (ad extera
Europae noscenda). More data come from the
4th-century AD poet Avienus (Ora Maritima,
114-45, 380-89, 404-15), who uses some of
Himilco’s information to give an impression-
istic description of the Atlantic shores, and
particularly of the tin-rich areas.
The Carthaginian sailor stressed the enor-
mous difficulties (monsters, seaweed, lack of
wind, mist, sand-bars) of the journey to the
northern shores, a fact that has always been
interpreted as a way of scaring competitors
from that coast. Without denying that, I
would say that, in a sense, the description
of the Atlantic as an area of wilderness and
danger is a typical colonial construct, reminis-
cent of more recent situations, in which the
others’ land is presented as a counter-image
of one’s own world—the tamed and familiar
Mediterranean, in this case. The geography of
the early modern explorations is full of similar
narratives that were influenced by Classical
legends (Dathorne 1994: 21-27). It is not by
chance that, for Greeks and Romans, Hades
was considered to be located on the Atlantic
Ocean (Strabo 1.1.4; 3.2.13). Furthermore, the
simplicity and vagueness of the descriptions
of the Atlantic provided by Mediterranean
authors call to mind the modern Orientalist
lack of accuracy when it comes to representing
the other (Said 2001: 71).
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Recent research has exponentially increased
our knowledge of the Phoenician and Punic
presence in Portugal (Tavares 2001; Arruda
2002) (Figure 2). First, although they are
scarcely referenced in the extant ancient
literature (Avienus, Ora Maritima, 375-77;
Guerra 2001), we do know that there were
Phoenician trading outposts along this coast,
which are far older than Himilco’s expedition.
The most important so far is Abul (Mayet and
da Silva 1994; 2000; 2001), a small outpost
in the Sado estuary, and the only site whose
Phoenician origin is beyond doubt. This was
basically a large square building surrounded
by a thick wall and composed of several rooms
(warehouses) organized around a courtyard,
and which yielded a great quantity of ampho-
rae and containers. Two different building
episodes have been identified, the last of
which included the construction of an altar in
the middle of the courtyard. The Phoenician
occupations dates to the 7th and 6th centu-
ries, and a Punic shrine and settlement were
later founded nearby (Mayet and da Silva
2001).
Other sites have produced Phoenician-style
structures and Phoenician and Orientaliz-
ing pottery: Rocha Branca, Tavira, Olissipo,
Alcâcer do Sal, Santa Olaia (Gomes 1993;
Pereira 1993; Frankenstein 1997; Arruda 2002;
Maia 2004). Most of them are indigenous sites
with numerous Mediterranean imports (Mayet
and da Silva 1994: 186). Other coastal settle-
ments like Olissipo and Santa Olaia may be
Tartessian outposts (Aubet 1993: 218, fig. 45),
perhaps multi-cultural communities (includ-
2
ing Phoenicians and natives). Recently, it has
been suggested that the site of Tavira may be a
Phoenician and later Punic town, as shown by
the great quantities of Mediterranean pottery,
along with characteristic features of Phoeni-
cian/Punic settlements, including a sanctuary
to Baal and Astarte (Maia and Silva 2004)
and an inscription in the Phoenician language
on a potsherd.
 Past the Last Outpost 127

Figure 2. Some of the most important Phoenician/Punic and orientalizing settlements in Portugal: 1. Santa Olaia
2. Conimbriga 3. Olissipo 4. Abul 5. Alcácer do Sal 6. Rocha Branca 7. Tavira 8. Castro Marim 9. Mértola.

Although its ethnic character is disputed, consumed Phoenician-style ivories, brooches

the site of Santa Olaia (Pereira), near the
Mondego river mouth, has a special interest.
It is the last known Mediterranean outpost on
the Iberian Atlantic façade. Excavations have
yielded a stone rampart, rectangular houses,
a metallurgical quarter and an important col-
lection of Phoenician pottery (7th–5th cen-
turies BC), including large painted containers
and R-1 amphoras. This outpost favoured the
emergence of a local Orientalizing culture in
neighboring indigenous settlements, such as
Conimbriga, Crasto and Chões, whose elites
and jewels (Correia 1993; Frankenstein 1997).
Arruda (2002) argues that many Phoenician
and Orientalizing settlements in Portugal dis-
appeared or faded away between the 6th and
5th centuries BC, a phenomenon that can be
at least partially related to the decadence of
Tyre and its western colonies (Aubet 1993:
273-76). Nevertheless, other sites, such as
Tavira, did not vanish, despite suffering great
changes in the late 6th century BC (Maia
2004: 6): most of the original settlement was
abandoned, but the port area grew and a new

© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006

128 González-Ruibal

artificial harbour (cothon), a typical Carthag-
inian feature, was added. Perhaps meaning-
fully, the comptoir of Abul was superseded by a
sanctuary (6th–5th centuries BC), located very
close to the original settlement (Mayet and da
Silva 2000: 167-68). We can hypothesize that,
after the 6th century, the Carthaginians began
to take some sort of control and reinvigorated
some of these old sites with new structures
(temples and harbours). Himilco’s journey
must be linked to this process.
Evidence that can be related to the earliest
Carthaginian expeditions is also notable in
the northwest of Iberia. There, Mediterranean
remains made a sudden and relatively mas-
sive appearance around the 5th century BC
(González-Ruibal 2004a: 296): pottery, glass
beads and even a polychrome glass aryballos
have been discovered in sites dated to the late
6th to early 4th centuries BC (Figure 3).
As in the African case, we know that Medi-
terranean sailors explored places that were
far from their last outposts, specifically south-
ern Britain and Brittany. On the one hand,
there are some ancient accounts that refer to
these explorations, namely Pytheas’s (Cunliffe
2001) and Himilco’s travels. Nevertheless,
these voyages did not result in any regular
trade with northwestern Europe. The Medi-
terranean artefacts that have been located,
mainly coins (see, among others, Milne 1948;
Sanquer 1983; Cunliffe 1991: 431; 2001: 72;
Newman 1997) and glass beads, were probably
transported down-the-line or by middlemen.
Most of the finds that were considered genuine
by Harbison and Laing (1974) are probably
easier to explain as contacts among aristocrats,
as some also appear in central Europe, but
rarely on the Atlantic façade of Iberia. Despite
the intense activity led by Iron Age archaeolo-

Figure 3. Some of the earliest Punic imports in the extreme northwest (6th–5th century BC). From top to bottom:
glass beads from Pena Redonda (Ponte Caldelas), a painted cup from Coto de Altamira (As Neves) and a
plain cup from Castrovite (A Estrada), all from the province of Pontevedra (Galicia, Spain).

© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006


gists in Britain, pre-Roman Mediterranean ele-
ments are exceedingly rare: important trading
ports such as Mount Batten (Cunliffe 1988)
should have yielded Punic remains, if it were
the case that Mediterranean merchants were
travelling so far north. Lacking Punic pottery,
it is therefore reasonable to think that, apart
from some expeditions, the end of the Punic
world, in practical terms, lay on the northern
coast of Iberia.
The relations between Punic sailors and
natives around the extreme Atlantic outposts
and beyond have scarcely been investigated.
There is, however, an area that was never
occupied by Mediterranean merchants and
that nevertheless maintained close relations
with them: I am referring to the northwest of
Iberia.
Dealing with Otherness, Finding a Middle
Ground
Gallaecia (modern Galicia)—the Islands of
Tin (Pliny, Naturalis Historia 4.119.2)—is the
remotest western territory where any Mediter-
ranean merchant conducted trade directly and
on a regular basis, without establishing formal
colonies or trade posts, until the late 1st
century BC. It is located more than 1,000 km
distant from the closest important Punic town
(Gadir, modern Cádiz, in southern Spain).
Gallaecia was, from a Punic point of view,
an absolutely alien territory, well beyond
the comfortable sphere of Mediterraneanized
regions. It was not an easy place to conduct
trade, if compared to the Mediterranean,
where Greek and Phoenician customs had
spread since the 8th century BC, and less so
actually to live. Malkin (2004: 348) says that,
in contrast to the colonizers of the New World,
the ancient Greeks did not perceive the lands
they reached as inhabited by ‘absolute others’,
and that, as colonization progressed, even
remote places like the Black Sea became part
of the familiar world, the oikumene. Maybe we
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Past the Last Outpost 129
cannot assert that Gallaecians were ‘absolute
others’, as the region had been in touch with
the Mediterranean since the Late Bronze Age
(González-Ruibal 2004a); but they were cer-
tainly closer in the Punic or Greek imagina-
tion to the mythic Hyperboreans than to the
Etruscans. Before the Roman annexation, in
the late 1st century BC, Gallaecia was never
colonized.
A complex and nuanced panorama can now
be depicted for the Gallaecians (Figure 4),
thanks to new excavations and (mainly) to
innovative and theoretically-oriented research
(Sastre Prats 2002; Parcero Oubiña 2003). For
many years, the region has been a backwater
in Iberian Iron Age archaeology, their inhab-
itants being considered the most ‘primitive’
and least developed societies of the Peninsula,
among other things due to their distance from
the Mediterranean. Even today, they scarcely
feature in synthetic accounts of Iberian archae-
ology. A good example of this is the book on
the Iron Age by Almagro-Gorbea et al. (2001),
whose avowed imbalance towards the Medi-
terranean world (and especially the colonies)
shows that ancient colonial categories still
drive some modern archaeological agendas.
A similarly telling example of this lingering
colonial gaze is evident in Presedo et al. (1988:
402): writing about Himilco’s journey, they
say that the Punic sailor failed to establish
colonies in the remotest parts of Africa that he
visited due to ‘the state of underdevelopment
and lack of culture in which the native popula-
tions lived’.
The peoples of Atlantic Iberia are gener-
ally considered Celtic—a controversial label
of dubious usefulness (Collis 2003) and with
potential colonialist implications (by adopt-
ing a Mediterranean-centered gaze). Greek
and Roman authors regarded the populations
from the northwest as a quite uniform bunch
of barbarians (‘highlanders’, in Strabo’s Geog-
raphy). A similarly homogenizing vision has
been maintained by modern archaeologists in
130 González-Ruibal
Figure 4. A typical coastal hillfort in Galicia (northwest Spain): Castro de Baroña, which has yielded some Punic
pottery, amphorae and glass beads.
Iberia, who have usually defended a uniform
archaeological culture in the northwest: the
‘Castro Culture’ (see Queiroga 2003). Recent
research has proved that even those ele-
ments that were considered typical of the ‘cul-
ture’ as a whole, such as stone round-houses,
are far from widespread (González-Ruibal,
in press). A post-colonial approach has to
take into account the complex, dynamic and
fragmented character of indigenous communi-
ties. Thus, I have proposed that behind the
northern Iberian highlanders we actually have
a diverse cultural geography that comprises at
least three large regions with different political
organizations and different ways of construct-
ing social identities (González-Ruibal 2006; in
press).
In northern Portugal and southern Galicia
there existed more hierarchical social struc-
tures and more sophisticated material cultures
of power, including elaborate stone carv-
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
ings, a monumental architectural tradition in
stone, and jewellery (González-Ruibal 2004a).
By the Late Iron Age (2nd–1st century BC)
strongly hierarchical house societies, revolving
around large oppida (c. 10-20 ha) prevailed
in the region (González-Ruibal 2006), which
had been in regular touch with southern
merchants since the early 1st millennium
BC. The most important evidence of a Punic
presence (including most sites mentioned in
this article) is to be found along these coasts.
Northern Galicia was occupied by smaller
chiefdoms, in which wealth and social status
was based on cattle and jewels (especially
gold torcs) (Parcero Oubiña 2003). People
lived in small (c. 0.5-2 ha), well-defended hill-
forts, often with perishable architecture, and
had scant contact with Mediterranean sailors.
Apparently, trade focused on a few coastal
locations, the most important of which was
A Coruña bay, in whose waters several Punic

amphoras have been recovered (González-
Ruibal 2004a: 299-300). Finally, the eastern
ranges of Galicia, northern Portugal, León
and Asturias were occupied by groups that I
have defined in terms of the anthropological
concept of ‘deep rurals’ (González-Ruibal,
in press), in which collective ethics were
more prevalent, relations with outsiders were
curtailed and small hillforts (again 0.5-2 ha)
predominantly emphasized community over
individual status (Sastre Prats 2002). Local
patterns of consumption and the appropria-
tion of foreign artefacts and knowledge varied
greatly according to the regional diversity that
has been outlined.
With regard to the Punic sailors, recent works
prove that their presence in northern Iberia
Figure 5. The ‘Rías Baixas’ (Galicia) in the northwest of Iberia, with the most important archaeological sites that
have yielded evidence of interaction with Punics.
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Past the Last Outpost 131
was much more important than previously
thought: apparently, Punic sailors were season-
ally inhabiting indigenous settlements. The
best evidence comes from two sites that played
the role of native emporia: A Lanzada (Suárez
Otero and Fariña Busto 1990) and Punta do
Muiño, also called Museo do Mar and Alcabre
(Suárez Otero 2004a; 2004b; González-Ruibal
2004a: 296-98) (Figure 5). Moreover, in the
northwest of Iberia as a whole, around 60
sites from the late 5th to the late 1st centuries
BC have produced Mediterranean materials
(González-Ruibal 2004a: fig. 8). The evidence
of Punic presence in A Lanzada and Punta do
Muiño is manifold: we have shrines, structures
and Mediterranean artefacts. The massive
appearance of amphorae, containers, tableware
132 González-Ruibal
Figure 6. Late Punic amphorae and common ware from Montelagre hillfort (Pontevedra, Galicia): 2nd–1st
century BC.
and cooking pots (Figure 6), as opposed to the
scarcity of fine ware, is a common pattern in
Phoenician and Punic outposts (López Pardo
1992a: 281-83; Mayet and da Silva 1994: 176-
79). In particular, the abundance of amphorae
usually suggests the commercial character of an
outpost (López Pardo 1992a: 283). Due to the
lack of well-published reports, it is hard to cal-
culate the proportion of Punic sherds in rela-
tion to the total amount of pottery excavated.
The only hillfort for which quantitative data
have been published—Romariz, in northern
Portugal—yielded 26% imported materials in a
5th–4th century BC level (da Silva 1999: 119).
According to its excavators, a Punic ritual
structure in Punta do Muiño (see below) was
associated with Punic pottery alone (Vicente
Caramés, personal communication, 2003).
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
With regard to structures, the Punics prob-
ably occupied perishable huts, as is often the
case in early or temporary Phoenician settle-
ments, such as the first phases of Mogador
(López Pardo 1992a: 280) and La Fonteta
(González Prats 1999), on the Levantine coast
of Spain: perishable huts have been located
in Punta do Muiño along with Punic pottery
(Suárez Otero 2004b). However, in A Lanzada
there is a rectangular structure (a warehouse?),
whose foreign origin is almost certain, given
its early date (5th–4th century BC) and the
fact that similar structures only became wide-
spread in the area during the 1st century AD.
The crudeness of the masonry is similar to that
of other Semitic settlements in Iberia, such as
Abul (Mayet and da Silva 2000) or Chorreras
(Aubet 1986: fig. 2, plate III), and it contrasts

sharply with the robust and well-fashioned
walls of local constructions. This panorama is
interesting in itself, because it shows a colo-
nial situation somewhat reversed: the indig-
enous people not only had the control over
their own land and granted a space for the
foreigners to stay and conduct trade, but they
also lived in monumental buildings, whereas
the sailors inhabited flimsy shacks.
It can be argued that the relations between
Punics and Gallaecians were channeled through
four main mechanisms: maps, myths, temples
and markets.
Maps
By maps I understand cognitive represen-
tations—devices that allow people to ori-
ent themselves both spatially and temporally.
From this point of view, Punic merchants can
be said to have ‘mapped’ the northwest of Ibe-
ria in two ways: by occupying the places in the
landscape that resembled more closely those
with which they were already acquainted in
the Mediterranean, and by renaming and
inscribing the land with Punic names and sto-
ries. A third form of appropriation is related to
the cultural geography of the area, which will
be studied in the following section.
With regard to the landscape, one of the
first striking things is the resemblance between
the places where more eloquent evidence for
the Punic presence has been recovered, and
the location of Punic and Phoenician settle-
ments in the Mediterranean: prominent capes
flanked by beaches, coastal promontories close
to estuaries, and small isles near the coast (Fig-
ure 7). The similarity of the setting of Phoeni-
cian/Punic towns and factories everywhere in
the Mediterranean and Atlantic (Aubet 1993:
figs. 3, 39, 41, and 46) is typically interpreted
in functional terms: the settlers selected those
places that offered the greatest advantages for
long-distance trade and sailing (Pellicer et al.
1977: 220-22). This cannot be denied, but
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Past the Last Outpost 133
it is not the full answer: travelling to distant
lands means coming in contact with differ-
ent people, experiencing other landscapes
and materialities. It also means vulnerability
and isolation. This phenomenological side
of colonialism is usually not acknowledged,
but clinging to the familiar—or the fabrica-
tion of familiarity—is a usual resort of colo-
nists. As Said (2001: 58-59) wrote, there is
a necessity to see new things as versions of a
previously known thing. The need for famili-
arity can be found among settlers, colonists
and conquerors of any kind; but it is felt as
something especially necessary in the case of
those displaced peoples who do not occupy
a dominant position in the new land. It is
perhaps not by chance that some Phoenician
settlements were called ‘The Fortress’ (Gadir,
Abul, Mogador) (López Pardo 2000: 227-28),
and were physically or symbolically detached
from their surroundings.
The need for the predictable was also solved
by the Punic traders through a re-inscription
of the landscape in order to make it fit into
their own cultural imagination. This mapping
process, an exercise in ‘imaginative geogra-
phy’ (Said 2001: 73), is well known in the
Greek case (Blázquez 1996; Malkin 1998).
The process implies a thorough renaming of
the most prominent geographical elements of
an alien landscape and the transfer of myths to
them. The aim is the symbolic (if not actual)
dispossession of the natives from their land
(Domínguez 2002: 68-69). It is, then, a sort
of ‘geographical violence’, as Domínguez has
remarked (using Said’s words). According
to Bhabha (1994: 246): ‘The colonial space
is the terra incognita or the terra nulla, the
empty or wasted land whose history has to
be begun, whose archives must be filled out’
and Spivak (1999: 212) has pointed out that
‘the necessary yet contradictory assumption of
an uninscribed earth that is the condition of
possibility of the worlding of a world generates
the force to make the “native” see himself as
134 González-Ruibal
Figure 7. Topographical setting of some of the most important settlements with Punic evidence in northwestern
Iberia: 1. A Lanzada 2. Neixón 3. Punta do Muiño 4. Toralla.
other’. I argue that—differences with modern
colonialism notwithstanding—the Mediter-
ranean attitude to the Atlantic bears some
similarities with this hegemonic insight. The
inscription of the land, however, should not
be regarded simply in terms of asymmetrical
power relations: we have to look at it in
the light of the concept of ambivalence, as
defined by Bhabha (1994). The attempt to
inscribe the land must be understood rather
as a desire—a fantasy—for control and secu-
rity, which is always unfulfilled and subject to
challenge by the other. This is quite clear in
the case of the Punic people on the Atlantic
façade: the attempt to reduce otherness to
the same is a way of exorcizing the fear of the
unknown, a fantasy of domination, in a place
always beyond the effective power of Gadir or
Carthage.
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Phoenicians and Punic sailors named sev-
eral prominent capes on the Atlantic façade
of Iberia after their god Baal Hammon—later
translated as Saturn by the Romans (Marín
Ceballos 1992: 11-12). This god also had a
temple in the Punic port of Tavira (Maia
and Silva 2004). Melqart was another impor-
tant deity transported to the Atlantic, as
shown by the temple he had on Cape San
Vicente, in southern Portugal (Avienus Ora
Maritima, 201-205, 326-27; Salinas 1988),
and by the fact that Melqart/Hercules’ deeds
were thought to have occurred in remote
Atlantic regions (Strabo 1.2.2; Blázquez 1996:
104, 106). Melqart was probably the most
important divinity for the Punic peoples liv-
ing on the Atlantic shore, given the fame of
some of his temples, such as those located in
Gadir (Bonnet 1988) and Lixus (López Pardo

1992b). In addition, a Phoenician myth has
been recently discovered in Al-Idrisi’s geogra-
phy (Matesanz 2002), from the 12th century
AD, referring to Olissipo (Lisbon).
Even those areas that lay beyond the Punic
control were symbolically conquered by renam-
ing: a cape in northern Gallaecia is today
called Punta da Muller Mariña (Cape of the
Marine Woman). It is very likely that, hidden
behind this intriguing appellation, there lies
a Venus Marina, and before that Astarte, to
whom many coastal features were dedicated in
the Mediterranean (Aubet 1969: 61), includ-
ing an isle in Gadir (Avienus, Ora Maritima,
315-317). Avienus, drawing upon the Periplus
of Himilco, also mentions a cape of Venus in
the far north of Iberia (Ora Maritima, 158).
Very close to this cape, in the port of Bares,
there were discovered six Punic coins from
the cities of Gadir, Abdera and Ebussus (2nd
century BC) (Maciñeira 1947: pl. 25; Suárez
Otero 1996) (Figure 8). Interestingly, sailors
sought in Astarte/Venus protection for their
Figure 8. The ‘Cape of the Marine Woman’ in northern Galicia and the Punic coins located nearby.
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Past the Last Outpost 135
journey (Lipinski 2004: 154), a fact that again
points to the insecurities of colonists and mer-
chants in foreign lands. Obviously, these alien
geographies were contested by locals: it is not
by chance that native geographical names
are the ones that have mainly survived to the
present day (most obviously in river names:
e.g. Minius>Miño). Two different (mythical)
geographies co-existed and probably mingled
in the same physical space.
Myths
The process of appropriating the geography
implied also the renaming of settlements and
peoples, a phenomenon that provided time
depth to spatial maps, by tracing genealogies
that linked the Atlantic to Mediterranean
history. Punic settlers and merchants, like the
Greeks, often resorted to false etymologies to
explain local names in Punic terms.
There are very significant cases of this
ambiguous attempt to transform the Other
136 González-Ruibal
into the Same in the case of Gallaecia. At
least three local groups were reinterpreted
with Greek ethnic names. The Grovii were
called Graii, ‘Greeks’, and they were con-
sidered to be the children of Aeneus, king
of Aetolia (Silius Italicus, Punica 3.366-67).
The Cileni were reinterpreted as Helleni and
their origin was linked to Teucer’s travels to
the west, after the fall of Troy (Strabo 3.2.13;
Justin 44.3.3; Pliny, Naturalis Historia 4.112).
Finally a group called Amphilochos—prob-
ably a Celtic name *Ambi- (Bermejo Barrera
1982: 13)—was related to the nostos of the
hero of the same name (Strabo 3.2.13). Teuc-
er’s story is particularly interesting, because his
nostos links Gallaecia with important Phoeni-
cian and Punic places—Cyprus, Carthago
Nova and Gadir (Silius Italicus, Punica 3.368;
Philostratos, Vita Apollonii 5.5).
It is very likely that these stories, transmit-
ted by Greek authors, were derived from Punic
ideas and information. Another possibility is
that the Punic merchants themselves were
carrying Greek myths to the far west, just as
they were carrying Greek pottery. Besides,
the differences between distinct Greek and
Punic cultures were becoming blurred during
Hellenistic times. Through the ‘Mediterrane-
anization’ of its physical and cultural geogra-
phy, a strange world inhabited by barbaroi was
partially deprived of its Otherness: ‘the threat
is muted, familiar values impose themselves,
and in the end the mind reduces the pressure
upon it by accommodating things to itself
as either “original” or “repetitious” ’ (Said
2001: 59). Malkin (2004: 352) has said that
extending Greek origin myths to barbarians
went against their being perceived as absolute
Others. I do not agree with him fully at this
point. European missionaries extended Judeo-
Christian myths to heathen populations (usu-
ally identifying ‘primitives’ with any of Israel’s
lost tribes), which did not reverse their percep-
tion of them as fundamentally different—and
conquerable. And even if it goes against radi-
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
cal alterity, fabricating genealogies for others is
a colonial enterprise, which enables the crea-
tion of hierarchies and irredentism (Malkin
1998: 208; 2004: 360-61; Said 2001: 66).
We should distinguish here the Punic and the
native perceptions of local ethnicity which, at
the same time, were deeply intertwined. From
the Mediterranean point of view, it seems
that sailors were distinguishing two very dif-
ferent areas in Gallaecia on the basis of their
own experience of contact with the local
populations. Those peoples that inhabited the
northernmost parts of Gallaecia were labelled
as Celtici (Pliny, Naturalis Historia 4, 111); in
contrast, the people living in the south were
identified as Helleni and Graii (Pliny Naturalis
Historia 4, 112). What is being stressed, then,
is a distinction between somewhat Mediterra-
neanized and non-Mediterraneanized peoples.
This cognitive map coincides with the density
of Mediterranean items located in hillforts in
both areas (Figure 9).
From a local perspective, it is possible that
the so-called Helleni and Graii may well have
felt some kind of genealogical tie to the
Mediterranean sailors, after several decades
of contact. Significantly, Gallaecian warriors
fought on Hannibal’s side during the Second
Punic War (Silius Italicus, Punica 3, 344-45).
Some material evidence for the assimilation of
foreign myths might be provided by a group of
statues of seated gods that have come to light
in southern Gallaecia. They represent a deity
with spiral armlets and short tunic seated on
a throne and usually holding a vase or two
(González-Ruibal 2004b: 126-27), a hybrid of
Mediterranean and local forms. This implies
that some Gallaecians were acquainted with
foreign myths and were elaborating them on
local grounds. Whoever was the Mediterra-
nean-inspired hero(es) that linked the Gal-
laecians to the East, they could have easily
translated a local origin myth to a Mediterra-
nean mythical discourse. Stories of migrations
from the east were not absent in indigenous

Figure 9. ‘Greek’ (Helleni, Graii) and ‘Celtic’ (Celtici) populations as imagined by Mediterranean peoples, in rela-
tion to finds of Mediterranean pottery (Punic, Greek, Iberian, Italic).
mythology (Avienus, Ora Maritima, 152-
155). We can consider this a case of mimicry
(Bhabha 1994: 85-92). As Bhabha (1994:
112) would say, the Gallaecians were turn-
ing their gaze ‘back upon the eye of power’.
Pompeius Trogus’s text (epitomized in Justin
44.4.4) is especially compelling, because it
reveals uneasiness with the local appropriation
of a Mediterranean origin, echoing ideas of
imposture that resonate in many colonial writ-
ings (Said 2001): ‘with regard to Gallaecians,
they claim for them [sibi adserunt] a Greek ori-
gin’ (my emphasis). A similar case among the
Etruscans has been explored by Malkin (1998).
Meaningfully, both Gallaecians and Etruscans
lived beyond the effective colonial powers,
and could safely and creatively elaborate on
their myths. Etruscans and Gallaecians, by
reshaping alien myths of origin were creating
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Past the Last Outpost 137
a hybrid space ‘in-between’, one that enabled
interaction with aliens—no longer strangers,
but kin-related.
In my opinion, this appropriation of for-
eign myths, which is a case of mimicry that
empowers its performers, is not dissimilar to
the appropriation of other things and knowl-
edge by natives (or rather native elites), such
as jewelry techniques and sculpture. Myths
can be also considered a technology of power,
negotiated according to the political econo-
mies prevailing in each local community.
Thus, in the north of Gallaecia, where status
was negotiated through jewelry and cattle,
new Mediterranean techniques, such as filigree
and granulation (García Vuelta 2002), were
adopted to enhance local torcs. In the south,
where house societies achieved a growing
importance during the second half of the 1st
138 González-Ruibal
millennium BC, elite individuals resorted to
architectural decoration and sculpture as novel
avenues to display power and reinforce dis-
tinction (González-Ruibal 2004b). The influx
is clearly Mediterranean—there is no other
strong sculptural tradition in Atlantic Europe
during the Iron Age, but the idea was thor-
oughly appropriated and transformed in the
hands of local artisans. This phenomenon is
especially interesting, given that no similar tra-
dition has been discovered in the central and
southern Portuguese coastal area, where the
presence of Phoenician and Punic people was
much more intense. It proves that local agency
determined which elements (myths, things
or techniques) were incorporated and which
rejected, at least as much as availability and
the actual foreign presence in the territory.
In conclusion, myths, like other technolo-
gies, although originally aimed at controlling
the Other (even if only symbolically), were
used by locals in unexpected ways to reinforce
their own power and to blur the distinc-
tion between themselves and the foreigners:
‘copying’, says Thomas (1991: 187), ‘is appro-
priation, a project engaged into specify alterity
and to incorporate the powers of the other’.
Similarly, the locales of interaction (temples/
markets), to be discussed next, turned out to
be spaces of contention, where alien things
were discussed and eventually rejected.
Temples/Markets
The most physical inscription of the land-
scape is represented by the foundation of
sanctuaries. Temples have a great deal of
relevance in Greek and Phoenician colonial-
ism and they were keys to enabling spaces for
trade—markets. ‘In ancient trade, the temple
built close to a market or place of exchange
guaranteed the protection of visitors and mer-
chants… The sanctuaries in antiquity were
the prime places of commercial transactions in
a foreign country’ (Aubet 1993: 234). Phoeni-
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
cian shrines and altars, usually endowed with
baetyls (aniconic representations of gods),
were erected in their colonies and in native
environments alike (López Pardo 1992b: 95).
The installation of these religious centers,
sometimes before the construction of a city,
has been explained in functional terms: they
were an ‘instrument’ to conduct trade with
natives (López Pardo 1992b: 97) and, at least
in Phoenician times, ensured the tutelage of
the temple of Tyre and the monarchy in the
commercial enterprise (Aubet 1993: 234).
The economic role of the Semitic temples—
which often had a treasury and later minted
coins—would have been similar to those of
the Near East. They hosted a wealth of infor-
mation about routes, ports, coasts and peoples,
and they acted as neutral guarantors of any
transaction carried out within their sacred
area: not only were Phoenicians allowed to
carry out negotiations there, but also foreign-
ers (Aubet 1993: 234-36).
The most important function of the sacred
area was to provide security to the merchants
and enable safe interaction with others: by
tracing a temenos and thrusting baetyls into
the ground, they were granting themselves
(and others) the protection of the god and
creating a safe, controlled space. Baetyls
marked the end of the lands over which they
ruled: from the ‘columns’ of Herakles/Melqart
in Gadir to the ‘altars’ of the Philenes in
Cyrenaica (Polybius 3.39.2; Malkin 1990). In
the extension of baetyls farther to the west, we
see evidence of an attempt to attach, at least
symbolically, remoter independent locations
to the well-tethered Punic core. As occurred
with mapping (above), this gesture can be
interpreted in two ways, which are telling of
its ambivalence: it may be read as a colonial
inscription of a foreign land, an appropria-
tion; yet it is also evidence of vulnerability—a
desire for fixity and stability—in an environ-
ment which is not as predictable and control-
lable as the Mediterranean.

Two Punic shrines are known in Gallaecia,
and two other places are very likely to have
had some kind of sacred space. In Punta do
Muiño/Museo do Mar, a small coastal prom-
ontory near the modern city of Vigo (Galicia,
Spain), a sanctuary with three (perhaps four)
baetyls was discovered in 2003 (Suárez Otero
2004a; 2004b). These baetyls were polished
granite blocks, over 1 m in length, deeply
thrust into the ground (Figure 10). The sacred
area was delimited by a square structure of
small stones. A large amount of Punic pot-
tery (around 2,000 fragments), mainly early
Mañá-Pascual A4 amphorae, was discovered.
There are some slight remains of perishable
structures, but no stone buildings. The sanctu-
ary was abandoned around the 4th century BC
and a native settlement, with massive stone
structures, was built on top of it. Very close
Figure 10. Punic baetyls discovered in a test pit beneath a Middle Iron Age house. Punta do Muiño (Pontevedra,
Galicia).
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Past the Last Outpost 139
to this site, at the hillfort of the small isle of
Toralla, another baetyl, identical to the three
discovered in Punta do Muiño, was found in
a rescue excavation (Abad Vidal 1998). The
polished stone, which was 1.1 m long, was
thrust into the ground in a layer of similar date
(6th–5th centuries BC), associated with per-
ishable structures. The hillfort has also yielded
a good quantity of Punic pottery, including
amphorae, red-slip ware, wheel-turned table-
wares and an unspecified number of blue glass
beads (Hidalgo 1990–91).
The resemblance of these structures to other
Punic shrines is remarkable. We have several
representations of baetyls in Phoenician ste-
lae (Barreca 1986: figs. 89, 123, 124; Moscati
1992: figs. 25, 45). They became very popular
in the 6th to 5th centuries BC (Moscati 1992:
39) and from the 4th century BC onwards
140 González-Ruibal
they began to disappear, due to the effects of
hellenization and the emergence of anthro-
pomorphic representations of deities (Moscati
1992: 45, 49). Actual temples with baetyls are
known in Crete, Sicily, Sardinia and Iberia
(Guerrero Ayuso 1986: 370-73; López Pardo
1992a: fig. 3; Shaw 2000; Tusa 2000). As for
the stelae representing baetyls, some of them
have been dated to the 6th to 5th centuries
BC (Tusa 2000), a chronology that fits well
the Gallaecian Punic shrines. In our case, we
know that these baetyls were foreign, because
no similar element has ever appeared in any
hillfort further inland or lacking Punic items.
The idea of the baetyl itself, however, could
have been understood and accepted by the
indigenous communities, given that their dei-
ties were aniconic until the Late Iron Age
(González-Ruibal 2004b). Since the shrines
were occupying native ground, it is reasonable
to think that the rites themselves were prob-
ably a mixture of local and foreign beliefs.
Figure 11. A fragment of possible votive statuette from A Lanzada (Pontevedra, Galicia) (right), compared to a
statuette from Bithia, Sicily (left).
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Other ritual evidence is less clear. In A
Lanzada, an important emporion like Punta
do Muiño, two artefacts might be related to
religious activities (González-Ruibal 2004c):
a votive statuette (Figure 11), similar to
those found on Eivissa, in the Balearic Islands
(Almagro Gorbea 1980), Sicily and Sardinia
(Moscati 1977: 53, fig. 4; 203-208) from the
3rd–1st centuries BC, and an askos (late 3rd–
early 2nd century BC), which is a vessel often
associated with funerary or religious contexts.
The impressive mountain of Santa Trega,
in the Miño estuary, is another relevant site.
The development of a large oppidum in the
1st century BC has left little traces of previous
occupations, but several pre-Augustan imports
have been recovered (Figure 12). From this
site comes a representation of Hercules that
dates from the Roman period. As we have
seen, Hercules/Melqart was one of the most
important Punic deities in the Atlantic. The
devotion to Melqart survived in Roman times
 Past the Last Outpost 141

and it is embodied in many small bronze figu-
rines of Hercules that have been found in the
area around the Strait of Gibraltar (Rodríguez
Oliva 1990: 95). It is reasonable to think that,
given the extraordinary strategic relevance of
the mountain of Santa Trega and its sacred
character for the natives themselves, the Punic
sailors could have established a small shrine
there, as they did in other places. The cult was
later appropriated and re-elaborated by the
natives, as shown by the persistence of the cult
to Hercules in Roman Gallaecia (Oria Segura
1989: 271).
Just as with mapping, we cannot simply
consider temples as a one-way imposition.
We have to view altars as a Punic attempt to
establish a dialogue both with local people
and local gods: they are spaces of negotia-
tion. Phoenician and Punic shrines were often
established in indigenous sacred places. A
case in point is the temple to Sardus Pater in
Antas (Sardinia), which is associated with
Iron Age Nuragic elite burials (Moscati 1992:
60). This island offers the best examples of
ritual uses of older pre-colonial monuments,
sometimes performed by natives using Punic

Figure 12. Mediterranean materials from Santa Trega (late 2nd century BC), including Italic amphorae, Campanian
ware and Punic glass beads, showing the prominence of the site as a trading post (after González-Ruibal
in press).

© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006

142 González-Ruibal
artefacts (van Dommelen 1997). In Gallaecia,
it is by no means accidental that the possible
cult to Hercules-Melqart was established in
Santa Trega, a locale of paramount religious
importance for local peoples since the Bronze
Age, as shown by its hundreds of petroglyphs
(Martínez Tamuxe 1980). With regard to
Punta do Muiño, the shrine was erected only a
few meters away from a ritual deposit of bronze
axes of the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition
(Caramés 2004). It is probably significant
that most other hillforts with a notable Punic
presence (Toralla, Montealegre, Neixón, A
Lanzada) were occupied well before the arrival
of the Punic sailors (9th–8th centuries BC).
When Punic traders arrived in the area, these
were ancestral locales already meaningful for
the local populations. Local traces of rituals
are scant. It is, however, worth mentioning the
Figure 13. Local materials (two decorated jars and an unguentarium) and Punic vessels from the structured deposit
in a ditch in Neixón hillfort (A Coruña, Galicia), 4th–2nd century BC (Ayán Vila et al. 2005, with
additions from the 2005 field season).
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
case of Neixón (A Coruña, Galicia), a coastal
hillfort with numerous Mediterranean imports,
including Punic amphorae (Mañá-Pascual A4,
Mañá C2) and Campanian A ware. Sur-
rounding the settlement, a ditch has been
excavated that yielded, among other things, a
probable ritual structured deposit containing
dog bones,3 local pottery (including an unguen-
tarium), and Punic vessels (Ayán Vila 2005)
(Figure 13). Another interesting example is an
Orientalizing bronze statuette discovered as a
votive offering in the Dola river, in northern
Galicia near the aforementioned ‘Cape of
the Marine Woman’, in an area frequented
by Punic sailors (Maciñeira 1947: 371); the
artefact is clearly Mediterranean, but the ritual
itself is native Atlantic. As in the case of maps
and myths, ritual places might have actually
made possible a ‘third space’ (Bhabha 1990:

211), which was neither Punic nor Gallaecian,
a hybrid middle ground that allowed a dialogue
‘in between’.
That the relation between Punics and locals
was a dialogue, based on a contested middle
ground rather than a colonial imposition, can
also be seen in the natives’ agency. Temples/
markets were a space of contention, locales
where alien goods were subjected to discus-
sion. As opposed to orthodox opinion, which
portrays locals as avid consumers of foreign
trinkets, Gallaecians appear as exigent part-
ners in their relation with the Punic traders.
Two specific technologies help make this
point clear: rotary quern-stones and wheel-
turned pottery. Both inventions were quickly
incorporated and replicated by most indig-
enous Iberian communities after their contact
with Phoenicians and Greeks, but not by Gal-
laecians. We know that they were acquainted
with rotary quern-stones, because they have
been located in hillforts dated to the 4th–3rd
centuries BC (Carballo et al. 2003), but they
only became popular during the 1st century BC
and especially after the Roman conquest.
A similar thing occurs with wheel-turned
pottery. Despite being familiar with wheel-
turned vessels through exchanges with Punic
merchants, Gallaecians were reluctant to use
the wheel themselves until the 1st century BC.
Painted pottery, common in the Punic world,
was extremely rare in Gallaecia, too, and Med-
iterranean models were seldom reproduced
by Gallaecian potters. Social agency appar-
ently hampered the replication of these alien
techniques. Significantly, Gallaecians used
other complex rotary technologies, such as in
jewelry (García Vuelta 2002). The rejection
of rotary quern-stones and wheels for making
pottery can only be explained as conscious
local technical choices, perhaps to be related
(among other things) to gender concepts: pot-
tery was a female task and quern-stones were
most likely used by women, too, as in the great
majority of traditional societies.
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
Past the Last Outpost 143
The same restrictions apply to fine ves-
sels, such as black-glaze pottery. They are
extremely rare in Gallaecia, unlike other
imports—amphorae or glass beads. In my
opinion, Gallaecians were mostly interested
in those things that could be consumed col-
lectively (e.g. wine) and that could be easily
adapted to local social needs and be circulated
widely (e.g. beads), thus maintaining and
creating social links (cf. Turgeon 2004: 42 for
a similar example)—qualities that black-glaze
pottery lacks. Fine vessels in other areas were
used for enhancing one’s prestige and finally
joined the owner in the tomb. This occurs
on the southern Portuguese coast, where the
indigenous elite used Attic and Campanian
pottery as a status marker (e.g. Soares 1978;
Arruda 1997). In the necropolis of the indig-
enous coastal settlement of Alcâcer do Sal,
for example, Attic pottery appears together
with local symbols of power (arms and fibu-
lae). Gallaecians had a conception of prestige
and legitimation of power that curtailed the
use of certain Mediterranean goods, because
they offered almost no possibilities for their
negotiation in collective terms nor could they
be validated through public confirmation—as
opposed to wine, for example, which could
be consumed in feasts sponsored by the elites,
and torcs, which could be conspicuously worn
at feasts or in war (see Woolf 2002: 11).
Conclusion
The Atlantic Ocean has been marginalized by
modern scholars interested in ancient coloni-
alism, partly because it has remained virtually
unknown to researchers outside the region, but
also due to the persistence of ancient colonial
categories in modern research: for ancient
scholars the Atlantic was a backward and
remote area in which few, if any, interesting
cultural developments could occur. In this arti-
cle, I have shown the importance of the Punic
presence in the Atlantic, and, especially, the
144 González-Ruibal
relevance of the region for gaining a differ-
ent insight into ancient colonialism. I argue
that borderlands show with more clarity than
core areas the ambivalence and ambiguities of
colonial narratives and the constant challenge
to which these narratives are subjected by oth-
ers. I have specifically examined the mecha-
nisms deployed by Punic sailors in northern
Iberia to inscribe an (almost) absolute alien
world and to enable a dialogue with (almost)
absolute others. I have suggested that maps,
myths, temples and markets were the basic
mechanisms that allowed Punic merchants to
come to terms with alterity and enable a space
of interaction, but they were also the means
by which any desire for control could be con-
tested by locals.
Most research on ancient colonialism has
focused on places where control was in the
conquerors’ hands, usually due to the effective
conquest of the local land. This has given an
air of inevitability to the colonial processes
and too strong an agency to the colonists, to
the detriment of the local people. The aim of
this article has been to demonstrate that things
are not necessarily so straightforward: mer-
chants, settlers and conquerors feel isolation
and insecurity; they have to struggle, physi-
cally and symbolically, with alien landscapes
and peoples. There is a vulnerability in the
colonizers’ identity and in the grounds of their
authority, as Homi Bhabha (1994) has argued.
The mechanisms they deploy for appropria-
tion of the land reveal an unfulfillable need
for control. Furthermore, some of the mecha-
nisms could be turned against the foreigners, as
Bhabha, again, has shown for recent colonial-
ism. By adopting and reshaping foreign myths
or geographies that were originally aimed
at symbolically controlling the Other, locals
could empower themselves, enable more egali-
tarian interactions with foreigners, and blur
the divide between themselves and the sailors.
This way of counter-attacking colonial nar-
ratives has been exemplified with the native
© The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006
communities of northwest Iberia, a region
known as Gallaecia in antiquity.
Moreover, it is obvious that merchants did
not simply deceive candid natives with their
fancy tricks and trifles. On the contrary, those
sacred neutral spaces for trade created by Punic
sailors and natives (temples/markets) became
places of contention, where techniques, arte-
facts and myths were discussed. Native agency
is especially clear in the Atlantic beyond effec-
tive Punic control: many widespread Mediter-
ranean techniques, such as the wheel or the
rotary quernstone, were rejected by the Gal-
laecians, whereas other forms of knowledge
(jewelry, sculpture) were appropriated accord-
ing to the particular political economies and
to their usefulness in establishing a symmetri-
cal relation with foreign sailors (myths).
Although I have dealt with a region that was
never colonized by Phoenicians/Punics, the
case that has been studied here could be useful
for rethinking early culture contact in regions
that were effectively settled by colonists. The
relations of domination that resulted from
contact between colonists and natives in dif-
ferent parts of the Mediterranean and beyond
were not necessarily enforced from the begin-
ning (Dietler 1998: 298): other ways of inter-
action, based on negotiation and the creation
of a middle ground, were possible. Historical
research has shown it to be so for modern colo-
nialism (White 1991) and archaeology can do
the same in antiquity.
Notes
1. In this article, the term ‘Punic’ is used to
define the western Phoenicians between the
late 6th century BC (after the fall of Tyre)
and the early 1st century AD (when the last
Punic independent kingdom, in Morocco,
was annexed by the Roman empire). On ter-
minology, see Aubet (1993: 5-12).
2. The Tartessians were an indigenous group in
Iberia who were deeply influenced by Eastern

Mediterranean cultural elements and devel-
oped a particular Orientalizing culture, like
the Etruscans in Italy (Torres 2002).
3. Dogs had a ritual role in Phoenician/Punic
religion. They have appeared in ritual pits,
but they are not unusual in indigenous Atlan-
tic ritual deposits, either.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Bill Rathje and Ana Rodríguez
Mayorgas for reading previous drafts of this
paper and for their valuable comments. I am
grateful to Roberto Aboal Fernández and
Xurxo Ayán Vila (Laboratorio de Arque-
oloxía e Formas Culturais and CSIC) for
kindly allowing me to use some unpublished
materials from their excavations presented in
Figures 6 and 13. Lois Armada Pita provided
important precisions about the Punic coins
from Ortigueira. Finally, I want to thank the
anonymous referees and the editors of the
journal for their suggestions and comments
which have considerably improved the article.
Any errors remain my own.
About the Author
Alfredo González-Ruibal is a MEC/Fulbright
post-doctoral fellow at the Stanford Archae-
ology Center. He holds a PhD in Prehistoric
Archaeology from the Complutense Univer-
sity of Madrid. His interests include the Iron
Age communities of Atlantic Europe; ancient
and modern colonialism, imperialism, cultural
contact and trade; ethnoarchaeology and the
archaeology of the contemporary past. http://
metamedia.stanford.edu:3455/Gonzal-
ezRuibal/Home
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