Early Phoenician Red Slip ware at Malta: some chronological issues

The study of the interface contexts between the Phoenicians and the indigenous communities in the colonized areas in terms of ceramic repertoires, requires a double perspective, that of the identification of the Levantine models in the early Red Slip Phoenician wares, and that of the transformations brought about by the arrival of the Phoenicians, both in the local repertoires and in the Phoenician ceramics themselves. In the case of Malta, these processes are blurred by the scarcity of the contexts, mostly of a funerary nature and often unreliable, in which traces of the two different cultures coexist. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify points of contact and mutual influence in the case studies presented, thus placing Malta within the dynamics of exchange and interaction between the Phoenicians and the indigenous peoples already known in other central Mediterranean colonies such as Utica, Motya and Sulky.