Hannibal's Dream

According to the official records, I was born at night the Monday 23rd of August 1982 in the idyllic Majorcan village of Capedera. I consider myself an Archaeologist and a Historian specialized on the short period of time in which the members of Hannibal Barca’s family were the leading actors of Carthage’s History, and, even from much of the Mediterranean one. However, this has not always been the case, mine was a late call.

I remember that when I was a child I wanted to be an inventor, a dream that faded away over the years to be replaced by other fantasies no less awesome and grandiloquent until my passion for reading and my overflowing imagination came together and develop an inner need of writing. The idea of creating fiction works was one of the main reasons why I decided to start a History Degree at the University of the Balearic Islands. The year was 2000, the very moment in which I started to get intrigued by Hannibal Barca’s Life and feats (and the ones of his family members).

Over the years, while the chapters of my novels were being written in my mind, I was delving into the topic, getting used to the documentary record of the Barcid time. Being aware that the best areas from which research on this topic were Archeology and the study of Classical Sources, I decided, together with some friends, to continue and finish the Degree at the Count City of Barcelona since it did not exist a research line at my Alma Mater devoted to the Phoenician and Punic World and, of course, I also wanted to broaden my mind. At the University of Barcelona I formally achieved my specialties on Archeology and Ancient History, but also I made contact with archaeologists and historians whose research and educational activities guided my first steps in research.

My devotion with Hannibal and the time in which he lived and died led me to the Archaeological laboratory of the Pompeu Fabra University which was directed by Prof. María Eugenia Aubet Semmler. Even if I was there only for a couple of months, it was then when I made my first contact with Phoenician and Punic materials. However, urged by my obsession and guided with some advice of the abovementioned researcher, my next steps took me to the outlying University of Almería where I finally met an almost forgotten part of my father’s family and with the Prof. José Luis López Castro, a well-known researcher born in Granada who by that time had already archaeologically intervened at some Western Phoenician sites with Barcid contexts.

With him, I completed my training in the Phoenician and Punic Studies, taking part in his fieldwork and laboratory research on the Phoenician sites of Baria (Villaricos) and Abdera (Adra), both in Almería. Those years allowed me to finish my thesis on the Roman conquest of Baria and its archaeological context associated with the Second Punic War. This work gave me access to my Diploma of Advanced Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid, obtained under the supervision and support from Prof. Fernando López Pardo and Prof. José Luis López Castro.

Under the direction of this last researcher, I also completed, a few years later (in 2011), my Ph.D. Dissertation on the Social and Economic policy developed by the Barcid strategists at the Iberian Peninsula. It has successfully defended before a Thesis tribunal whose members were among the best specialist on this topic. Since then, concurring with the peak of the crisis, I started my private odyssey on Europe, with small postdoctoral fellowships and contracts as the one I held in Paris under the supervision of Prof. Pierre Rouillard, or the one of Marburg, directed by Prof. Felix Teichner. These were the first steps that led me in 2015 to get an Individual Fellowship from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions of the Horizon 2020 program in Ghent University under the supervision of Prof. Roald Docter, one of the most renowned fellowships in Europe.

Among the commitments made with the dissemination of this project and its results, we assumed the creation and update of this blog in which I will try, as far as possible, to say a few things in layman terms on my research and other topics more or less interlinked with it. But I am not only an Ancient Historian and Archaeologist, I also consider myself a cinemagoer, an addict of literature, an enthusiast on TV shows and I love to lose my increasingly scarce free time playing board and video games. I am also prideful, disorganized and stubborn, but not everything is bad in my character since I am usually cheerful, hard-worker and almost military responsible.

Whether if you enjoy with stories about Archaeology, Ancient History, Computing techniques applied to both of them, whether you simply have spare time to join our elephants in their hard path, you are very welcome to my Hannibal’s Dream.