The Institut Català d’Arqueologia Clàssica (ICAC-CERCA) signs a new collaboration agreement with the Fundación Palarq.

Thanks to the new agreement, Dr. Carme Belarte, researcher from the MIRMED research group, will lead the project ‘En busca de los orígenes de la civilización númida: excavaciones y prospecciones en Sidi Saïd (Siliana, Túnez)’.

The project aims to deepen the knowledge of the formation and development of Numidian societies throughout the 1st millennium BC. To this end, it proposes to carry out prospecting and excavation work at the mentioned site. The excavation leaders are Chokri Touihri (INP), Yamen Sghaïer (INP), Maria Carme Belarte (ICAC), and David Montanero (ICAC).

The project is a successor to the one carried out between 2006 and 2014 in Althiburos, in the province of El Kef, which gave a great boost to the knowledge of the Numidian civilization. Most of the researchers who make up the team of the current proposal were also part of the Althiburos team.

In the case of Sidi Saïd, between 2017 and 2018, archaeological interventions were carried out within the framework of preventive archaeology, led by Chokri Touihri and Mounir Torchani. These works documented an urbanism of a certain complexity and a dense occupation in the explored areas, as well as a wall, provisionally dated to the mid-1st millennium BC. The site, contrary to what is usually the case in Tunisian protohistoric settlements, was not occupied during the Roman or Late Antique periods. This represents a fundamental difference and a great advantage compared to the case of Althiburos, which had an occupation sequence of 2,000 years between the end of the Bronze Age and the Middle Ages.

This project aims to deepen and expand the results obtained so far; in particular, it is expected to obtain information about the formative phases of the Numidian civilization, as well as its evolution and relationships with other contemporary societies, especially the Phoenician-Punic ones – Carthage and Utica.

In this new project, excavation work in Sidi Saïd, prospecting, and interdisciplinary analyses will be combined with the objectives of:

• Characterizing the Sidi Saïd site by obtaining documentation on its urbanism and architecture, both public (defensive system, possible temples, community warehouses) and private (domestic architecture, workshops), as well as the organization of urban space.
• Obtaining dating elements for the foundational phases of Sidi Saïd and establishing the occupation sequence for this habitat, including construction reforms and expansions or modifications of the occupied area, as well as the violent episode that ended the life of the settlement.
• Obtaining quality data on the economy and paleoenvironment, as well as on contacts and trade exchanges with other civilizations, mainly the Phoenician-Punic.
• Understanding the influence of the Phoenician-Punic civilization on the site, specifically on urbanism, domestic architecture, and the defensive system.

From ICAC, we thank the Fundación Palarq for the trust placed in our team and this project.