Content:
The western Mediterranean has long been a nexus of cultural contact, interaction, continuity, and transformation. It is a social intersection where indigenous populations intensively encountered both Greek and Phoenician settlers, seeding the growth of a complex, multifaceted social entanglement from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Consequently, the western Mediterranean is a perfect setting to study ancient culture contact, colonial relations, and social transformation processes. Concomitantly, it is an ideal locale to analyze the construction, negotiation, and representation of new identities, landscapes, and power dynamics. Over the past 20 years, many archaeological investigations in the region have explored the indigenous populations prior to and during this transformative period. The wealth of new spatial and contextual information facilitates a reexamination of traditional Mediterranean archaeological narratives through the analysis of models of movement, occupation, and interaction both within and between the various groups of people living concurrently throughout the region. This session aims to contextualize the indigenous populations that occupied the western Mediterranean during this period, exploring their landscapes, politics of identity, power dynamics, interconnectivity, social continuity, and transformation, as well as the transformative effects they may have had on their colonial counterparts. This session gathers a multitude of voices, both Mediterranean and foreign, to more comprehensively contextualize Late Bronze Age and Iron Age people, cultures, sites, and landscapes in the region. We welcome all papers dealing with these issues, including those presenting new and previously investigated topics that have yet to be published.