The Archaic Cemetery at Motya. A case-study for tracing early colonial Phoenician culture and mortuary traditions in the West Mediterranean

Abstract

The burial ground, roughly dating from the late 8th cent. BC onwards, is characterised in its earliest major phase by the almost exclusive practice of cremation, a rite that was introduced and largely attested in the Levant during the Iron Age1 . The same rite was inherited from the Phoenician homeland and became widespread in the western colonial world, where it eventually survived until the Hellenistic period. The purpose of the present paper is to re-examine briefly the archaeological evidence so far retrieved in the early island cemetery, stressing its main features and reviewing some of the current scholarly views and interpretations.