Defining Terms of Culture and Chronology: The Urban Development of "Punic-Roman" Tharros (20 min)

Presenters

Steven Ellis, University of Cincinnati; and Eric Poehler, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

The Punic-Roman city of Tharros, on the west coast of Sardinia, is best-known for its Punic history and material culture, thanks largely to the significant focus given over the years to its extramural, funerary remains. Much less is known about the city's urban history, the focus of the present paper. Drawing from the results of the University of Cincinnati's excavations of three different areas of the city since 2019, this presentation provides an account of the primary phases of urban development and decline, with a particular focus on the city's transition from Punic to Roman, a process traditionally dated to the third century B.C.E. While the city yields an abundance of Punic material in its urban deposits, most of the stratigraphic evidence for urban development dates to a significantly later period; indeed, and apart from a very few deposits and structures, the majority of depositional contexts we see (i.e., the fills for the construction of streets and buildings) date to not much earlier than the second century C.E. What this all points to is a city that is mostly a later construction than is conventionally believed. The aim of this presentation is thus to outline a clearer, evidence-based treatment of the city's primary phases of urban development and to consider to what extent, and why and how, some of these processes eliminated such sizable components of the city's earlier Punic-era remains.