La cultura talayótica una sociedad de la edad del hierro en la periferia de la colonización fenicia

Abstract

The Talayotic culture. An Iron Age society in the periphery of the phoenician colonization. The present study explains a critique about the chronological bases on which the origins of the Talayotic culture of the Balearic Islands have been grounded. From this, a new chronological framework is accepted, which has already been postulated by various research teams in recent years. The synchronicity that is seen between the Talayotic culture’s beginnings and its initial development, and the arrival of iron on the islands, as well as the substantial changes seen in the network of overseas trade in the Central and Western Mediterranean, which came to be monopolised by Phoenician merchants, permits us to suggest that the crystallisation and evolution of the Talayotic society, with its clear and well-known peculiarities, are also included within this geohistoric context. Indications of the Talayotic culture’s ultimate causes, however, point to endogenous origins and a period of prior gestation in the midst of Balearic communities of the Naviform Bronze Period. A sequence is also proposed for the models of trade among the agents that controlled long-distance maritime commerce, that is, among the Phoenicians, the Punic peoples of Ibiza afterwards, and the Talayotic communities of Majorca and Minorca. Not touched upon in the present paper are matters related to the typology and function of Cyclopean turriform architecture, nor those related to the material culture whose understanding has been re-assessed, up dated, and disseminated in the archaeological literature of recent years.