Phoenician pottery remains discovered
Important find hailed – fragments of items from day to day life unearthed
UP until now, the only pieces from the Phoenician era discovered in Villajoyosa had come from where they buried their dead at the Casete tombs (from the second half of the 7th century BC) and at Poble Nou (from a century later) – but new finds are thrilling archaeologists.
Both burial areas yielded numerous tombs, some very large and elaborate, reflecting an ancient Oriental society buried with jewellery, metal objects, ceramics and other items brought from Egypt, Canaan and other parts of the Mediterranean.
According to Villajoyosa’s municipal archaeological service, everything pointed to the fact that the population from that time had lived on the hill of the old town.
A surprise came during the archaeological monitoring of the refurbishment of a property located at Calle Fray Posidonio, 32, directed by Ana Martínez, at the end of 2022.
Never before had such a modest find – a simple rock layer preserved in a small area – been so important in local archaeology.
“What makes it special is that it contains fragments of amphorae, red engobe dishes and grey Phoenician-Punic pottery from the 6th century BC,” explained a council spokesperson.
For the first time, fragments of items had been found from day to day Phoenician life.
If remains of the Phoenician town had to appear somewhere, it had to be under a building next to the Renaissance wall, like this one, noted the spokesperson.
The explanation is very
simple: in 1301 Villajoyosa was founded and built in the style of the Christian conquest, with urban planning in the form of a grid.
They looked for the flattest possible terrain, and laid out parallel streets running down to the sea and others perpendicular to them.
This was nothing like the steep winding streets in Islamic towns, adapted to hills, such as Biar or Petrer.
But Villajoyosa was a ‘vila nova’, created from scratch.
It did not occupy a previous Islamic settlement, because there wasn’t one. Only the ruins of Allon, abandoned 700 years earlier, remained.
To create this flat surface, the centre of the hill had to be razed to the ground and this land had to be used as embankments for the wall that surrounded the new Villajoyosa.
In other words, a mound had to be converted into a large esplanade.
And in doing so, they destroyed the overlapping remains of the previous settlements around the centre of the hill – Phoenician, Iberian and Roman, built one on top of the other for 1,300 years (from the 7th century BC to the 6th century AD).
Only on the edges of Villajoyosa, right near its walls, those ancient rock layers were not razed to the ground, but covered and preserved.
The Phoenician rock layer was cut to build the river embankment, but part of it was preserved behind it.
Hence the first material evidence of the northernmost Phoenician colony on the Iberian Peninsula, founded in the 7th century BC, has been discovered.
Its position was strategic, a day's sail from the Phoenician settlements of La Fonteta (in Guardamar) to the south, and Ibiza to the east.
It was therefore a stopover on the shipping route between Gadir (Cádiz) and Canaan, as the Phoenicians called their country.
This explains the richness and exoticism of the pieces found in Villajoyosa, such as the well-known PhoenicianPunic gold necklaces, the talc stone amulets, the decorated ostrich eggs and the Egyptian New Year's canteen, among many others.