The Earthen Architecture of Phoenician and Punic Settlement. A Focus on Sardinia

Abstract

With migration follow traditions, memory, experiences, and skills, variably helping the adaptation to the new world. The Phoenicians, meeting the local populations of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts in the first millennium BCE, brought valuable knowledge to raw earth construction techniques there. Adapting to local needs, they modified their skills and created new patterns. The present contribution focuses on the similarities and differences that this construction technique portrays in the Phoenician and Punic settlements of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of the Iron Age. Through the previously unpublished documentation of Pani Loriga in Sardinia, some interesting points of analysis of the architecture in raw earth in the Phoenician and Punic world will be presented.