‘Almost the same’: dynamic domination and hybrid contexts in Iron Age Lixus, Larache, Morocco

Abstract

In recent years, in the wake of postcolonial studies, archaeologists have gradually begun to stress the concepts of coexistence and hybridization in their attempts to understand situations of culture contact. Domination and hegemony have also begun to lose ground in narratives of the past, as if these two sets of tenets were contradictory. We argue that there is room for a reassessment of this dichotomy. In this paper we address the problem through two avenues of analysis: first, we reassess the theoretical interpretation of the concept of hybridity and its ability to shed light on ancient colonial situations and, second, we apply these thoughts to a case study from the Phoenician trade diaspora in Lixus (Larache, Morocco).

Under Divine Wings: Forms of Ideological and Territorial Domination During the Iberian Iron Age

“…1). Their origins are seen today as part of a long process in which their social dynamics, both original and heterogeneous, are built in a context of extensive cultural contact, which I primarily conceive as multidirectional, asymmetrical and transformative (Gosden 2008; Delgado and Ferrer 2007; Cañete and Vives‐Ferrándiz 2011). The vast geography of the Iberian world appears, therefore, as a multilingual mosaic.…”