This chapter discusses Greek and Phoenician colonisation in the central Mediterranean as a historical activity. It presents the interactions between the colonising and existing local communities in Sicily and Malta as articulated through shared and modified practices expressed in the material culture record. Most contemporary Phoenician material in Sicily comes from Motya, an island site of Sicily's western coast founded by Phoenicians at the end of the eighth century. Late eighth-century Phoenician material also appears in the earliest graves of the Greek colonies. Finally, the chapter reviews the cultural and sociopolitical development of Malta and Sicily, both of which were geographically situated at strategic locales within a connected Mediterranean, to argue that their respective diverse developments resulted from their engagements with one another and the broader central Mediterranean. The permanent presence of Greeks and Phoenicians in the central Mediterranean led to the widespread exchange of goods, practices and ideas between these foreigners and the extant local populations.

The analysis of the development of social complexity among the peoples of the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula has broadly followed the general trends of European and North American archaeology. This chapter proposes a new synthesis of the processes of change between the Late Bronze Age and the Roman conquest in the northern regions of the Iberian culture area. First, it considers Godelier's structural Marxist evolutionary hypothesis, which is compatible with Johnson and Earle's model but hard to substantiate with the available data. According to Godelier's hypothesis, the transformation of an early Iron Age Great Man into a Big Man society requires some conditions. Then, the chapter examines role of culture contact and trade with colonial societies such as Phoenician, Etruscan and Greek. The chapter concludes that foreign trade was instrumental for indigenous elites to acquire and consolidate their privileged status; it probably did not play a significant role as a cause for social change.