Dr, Academy fellow Lorenzon Marta ja työryhmä (BuildinginNewLand)

Building in New Lands: Phoenician sustainable architecture and environmental adaptation along the Mediterranean Sea

Tieteellinen tutkimus / siihen pohjautuva työ | Kolmivuotinen

The Project Building in New Lands aims to study the modes of cultural relationship, identity development and interaction with the environment between the displaced Phoenician communities through the analysis of earthen building materials used in the creation of new settlements in the Western and Central Mediterranean throughout the first half of the 1st millennium BC. The approach to earthen archaeological remains allows us to explore the processes of economic and environmental adaptation to natural resources that the Phoenician communities experimented with in the new lands. Precisely these earthen materials are one of the best representations of our capacity as social groups to design and build complex architectures, using readily available, sustainable and economical natural resources. This project will focus on the examination of mudbricks because of their abundance in the archaic Phoenician colonies; because they were an unknown material to local communities; and because is a green, carbon zero emissions, and cross-cutting building material. Our methodology stands out for its interdisciplinary approach, combining traditional archaeological techniques along with others developed from the archaeological sciences (XRF, XRD, SEM-EDS, OM, envir. DNA, etc.). To conduct this research from a global perspective, a large international research team has been created to work about nine main case study sites with archaic Phoenician occupations: Utica (Tunisia), Motya (Italy), Sa Caleta, Fonteta, Melilla, Malaka, Gadir (Spain), Abul and Castelo de São Jorge (Portugal). This project has great potential for our understanding of human-environment interaction through the study of architecture, and one of its main assets is the large international team assembled to collaborate on it. But our conception of the project is to try to make the results reach today's society in order to show the benefits that this type of earthen architecture has for the environment.