Negotiating Identities, Constructing Territories: Pre-Roman Iberia, 900-200 BCE 

From the ninth century BCE the long coasts and fertile valleys of Iberia were tapped by Phoenician and Greek merchants and settlers coming from the eastern Mediterranean. An extended international network was slowly created, which also attracted the participation of Etruscans, Sardinians, Cypriots, and others. Iberia is a perfect laboratory for the study of these economic, cultural, and environmental horizons before the Mediterranean was politically connected under Rome. The ongoing interrogation of how these diverse groups first knitted an interconnected space is key to understanding the later Mediterranean of Classical and Roman periods in its true cultural depth. In 2003 Dietler and C. López-Ruiz organized a conference on this very topic at the UChicago, which resulted in the edited volume Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia: Greek, Phoenician, and Indigenous Relations (2009). Following two decades of intensive research stimulated in part by the questions raised at that conference, some of the same and additional experts in the key areas will meet in Chicago and be part of a new curated volume. Shifting the focus from colonial dynamics to the negotiation and construction of identities and territories, as well as new understanding of past environmental challenges, this project will bring novel data and perspectives to an international audience.  

Biography

Carolina López-Ruiz is Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Mythologies in the Divinity School and the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago since 2022. Previously she was Professor of Classics at the Ohio State University. She studied in the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of Chicago (2005 Ph.D. on the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World). She specializes in Greek and Near Eastern mythology and religion, cultural contact, and the Phoenician-Punic world with a focus on ancient Iberia. Her latest monograph, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean (2021), pushes back against the Hellenocentric framework of much scholarship and places the Phoenicians’ cultural agency front and center in the deep transformations that took place across Iron Age cultures in the early first millennium BCE. She co-directs the University of Chicago excavations at the Phoenician site of Cerro del Villar in Málaga, Spain, with D. Schloen (ISAC) and the University of Málaga.