Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia

Sebastián Celestino is a full time researcher at the CSIC (Spain) and the Director of the Institute of Archaeology of Mérida (Badajoz). He has been active as a field archaeologist for decades and has directed, among others, the excavations of Cancho Roano. He has published abundantly on Iberian porto-history and archaeology, and Tartessos in particular. Among his books are Cancho Roano (2001, Madrid), Estelas de guerrero y estelas diademadas: la precolonización y la formación del mundo tartésico (2001, Barcelona), and Tarteso: Un viaje a los confines del mundo antiguo (Trebled, 2014), and the coedited volumes on El período orientalizante (2 vols., 2005, Mérida) and Contacto cultural entre el Mediterráneo y el Atlántico (siglos XII-VIII and). La precolonización a debate (2008, Madrid).Carolina López-Ruiz is Associate Professor of Classics at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. She has published articles on Greek and Near Eastern literatures and mythology and topics related to the Phoenician presence in the western Mediterranean. She is the co-editor of Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia: Phoenician, Greek, and Indigenous Relations (2009, Chicago, with Michael Dietler) and the author of When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East (2010, Cambridge, MA). Her recently edited book Gods, Heroes, and Monsters: A Sourcebook of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern Myths in Translation (Oxford 2014) challenges the traditional view of the "classics" by situating Greek and Roman mythology in its broader Mediterranean context. She is the co-editor (with Brian Doak) of the Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (in preparation).

Tartessos is widely written in Spanish, but there has been a paucity of material in English. The remedy is to hand in Sebastián Celestino and Carolina López-Ruiz's volume, born in Columbus, Ohio... which provides the first synthesis in English on Tartessos (and a large stretch south-western Iberia) and relations with the Phoneticians, with a prime focus on the 8th-6th centuries BC. One author is an archaeologist, the other specialises in written sources; a happy blend.

• 1: In search of Tartessos 2: Tartessos in Greek Geography and Historiography 3: Tartessos through Carthaginian and Roman Lenses 4: The Far West in Mythological and Biblical Sources 5: Early Cross-Cultural Contacts 6: Human and Industrial Landscapes 7: Religious Spaces and Ritual Life 8: Art and Technology in Tartessos Epilogue: Tartessic questions