Pantelleria Island as a centre of production for the Archaic Phoenician trade in basaltic millstones : new evidence recovered and sampled from a shipwreck off Gozo (Malta) and a terrestrial site at Cádiz (Spain)

Abstract

New discoveries of flat Archaic querns recovered from the cargo of a Phoenician shipwreck at a depth of 110 m in Xlendi Bay (Gozo, Maltese Islands) dated to ca. 7th century BC and millstone fragments found at Cerro del Castillo (Cádiz, Spain) from Phoenician material between 7th and 6th century BC share the same petrographic texture and geochemical composition. The four samples consist of vesicle-rich grey basaltic lavas with a moderate porphyritic index and a microcrystalline intergranular groundmass. Major and trace elements distributions

of the investigated artifacts highlight a provenance from Pantelleria Island, which is located in the Mediterranean Sea between Sicily and Cape Bon (Tunisia). This rules out other important widespread sources of basic volcanic rocks that were also used for millstones in ancient times, such as Etna volcano, Iblei Mountains and the Levant. Due to its barycentric position in the Sicily Channel, Pantelleria Island could therefore have represented one of the main supplying area of volcanic millstones for the Phoenicians. The provenance from

Pantelleria was already documented for other volcanic millstones in Phoenician sites and Carthaginian settle- ments of Sicily (e.g. Motya and Entella) and Tunisia (e.g. Utica and Carthage) and those found in the shipwreck

of El Sec (off the coast of Mallorca), dated to ca. 4th century BC. The new millstones from Pantelleria discovered in (i) an older shipwreck cargo (i.e. Xlendi Bay) and (ii) the most westerly Phoenician settlement of Gadir (nowadays Cadiz, ca. 1500 km far from Pantelleria) point to widespread Phoenician trade in Pantellerian basaltic rocks in the Archaic Period. Pantelleria Island can therefore be considered as a nodal point for trade in volcanic millstones, many centuries before the Hellenistic people and the Romans would largely exploit the basaltic lavas from Etna and Iblei Mountains for the same purpose.