What was Tartessos? When was Tartessos? These are not familiar questions in Anglophone scholarship, let alone ones to which answers have been proposed by classicists or archaeologists writing in English. The name, or better, the toponym, of Tartessos nevertheless makes a regular appearance in classical studies, as a frequently cited passage of Herodotus (1.163.3) reports that King Arganthonios of Tartessos was fabulously wealthy and generous, offering to allow Phocaean Greeks to settle in his realm. This information is usually taken at face value, and appreciated as a rare piece of information about the otherwise literally ‘prehistoric’ inhabitants of the Western Mediterranean in the early first millennium BC (e.g. Garland Reference Garland2014: 42). On the Iberian Peninsula, by contrast, gallons of ink have been spilled and fierce debates have been waged, almost exclusively in Spanish, about precisely these questions—where and when was Tartessos?
It is this disconnect that has motivated Carolina López-Ruiz and Sebastián Celestino to team up and write the present book—whose title Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia immediately flags up where they are taking their discussion. This book is, however, rather more than a mere translation of Spanish debates into English, as the authors have set themselves an additional task, which is to bridge what Renfrew (Reference Renfrew1980) famously called the ‘Great Divide’ between the long tradition of classical scholarship and modern ‘anthropological’ archaeology.
The book accordingly opens with a chapter on the history of research on Tartessos, and this readily shows how ‘Tartessian studies’ developed well within the broad parameters of the trajectories of European and Mediterranean historical and archaeological studies. The authors show how the pioneering exploits of Edward Bonsor and Adolf Schulten from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century combined fieldwork with a close reading of classical sources, much as Heinrich Schliemann had done half a century earlier in the Eastern Mediterranean. At the end of the day, however, they came up empty-handed, and it was not until the chance discovery in 1958 of the hoard (or ‘treasure’) of El Carambolo, and the subsequent excavation of the associated ritual complex in modern Seville, that archaeological research of Tartessos came into its own. Spanish scholars took over, led by Maluquer de Motes, who was instrumental in situating Tartessos within the contemporaneous archaeological—basically Childean—terms of culture and settlement. In 1968, he convened the ground-breaking ‘Jerez Conference’ that brought together archaeologists, philologists, linguists and historians. Even if they failed to come to a consensus, the meeting galvanised research and gave rise to new conceptual and field-based approaches. As archaeologists have continued to dominate Tartessian studies, the main recent development has been the geographic expansion of research into the wider region of south-west Iberia, notably southern Portugal and Extremadura, adding landscape as a prominent avenue of research—again, more or less in line with developing academic interests elsewhere in Europe. In light of the present-day interest in connectivity and Mediterranean-wide colonial and indigenous interactions, and the resurgence of Phoenician archaeology over the past two decades, Anglophone scholarship and contemporary Tartessian studies resonate once more. This time Tartessos has also begun to make timid appearances on the international academic scene, as is perhaps best illustrated by the inclusion of a handful of objects from the El Carambolo hoard in the ‘Assyria to Iberia’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum (2014–2015), even if the mythical connections were left understated. Tartessos nevertheless makes a cameo appearance in the lavish catalogue, and the brief but pointed comment that “ancient Tartessos [was] an economy based on the circulation of Near Eastern prestige goods in the lands of aristocratic elites” (Aubet Reference Aubet, Aruz, Graff and Raki2014: 204) readily demonstrates how closely attuned archaeological interpretations of Tartessos have become to wider Mediterranean and international concepts and debates.
Celestino and López-Ruiz are well qualified to present the wide range of materials and evidence that have been amassed by scholars working on Tartessos; they are, respectively, an archaeologist with a long track record of fieldwork and study in southern Spain, and a classicist specialised in cultural history and philology, and well at home with the Levantine evidence too. Following the introduction, the book divides into two groups of chapters that discuss the philological and historical evidence (Chapters 2–4) and the archaeological material (Chapters 5–8). A brief ‘epilogue’ (Chapter 9) wraps up the volume by taking stock of these two lines of evidence, summarising key findings and insights, and highlighting the wider south-west Iberian, Phoenician and Mediterranean contexts and connections.
Overall, this is an excellent volume that assembles and organises a wide range of archaeological, philological, iconographic and other historical evidence for a region that despite its remoteness—from a central and eastern Mediterranean perspective—was well integrated in what Broodbank (Reference Broodbank2013) has famously termed the ‘Making of the Middle Sea’ in the earlier centuries of the first millennium BC. In doing so, the authors have also made it clear that this region deserves rather more attention than the occasional footnote that Tartessos has so far achieved in Anglophone scholarship—including in Broodbank's (Reference Broodbank2013) discussion of Mediterranean connectivity.
