Ana Margarida Costa Arruda dos Santos Gonçalves (born in 1955) is a Portuguese historian and archaeologist specialized in Phoenician-Punic archaeology.
Biography
Ana Margarida Arruda graduated in History in 1978, from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. She earned her PhD in Archaeology in 2000 from the same university, where she is working as researcher and professor since 1993. Arruda has collaborated with several universities including the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, the University of Seville or the University Pompeu i Fabra of Barcelona in Spain and the universities of Toulouse and of Paris 1 in France.
Arruda has participated and studied in depth most of the archaeological excavations related to the Phoenician colonisation of Portugal, like the former coastal sites of Santa Olaia, Abul, Alcaçova de Santarém, Castle of Castro Marim,Conímbriga, Setúbal, among others.
Arruda has demonstrated that the Phoenician presence in Portugal, mainly along its coast, started in the I millennium before Christ. She evidenced the greater antiquity of the archaeological sites of Santarém and Conímbriga with regard to the ones of Santa Olaia and Abul. She posits that the main interest of the Phoenicians for this region of the Iberian Peninsula was to develop trade, without discarding possible Phoenician interest for its native metallurgical technology. She do not discard the theory of the Spanish scolars Francisco José Moreno Arrastio and Fernando López Pardo that Phoenicians were also interested the slave trade. However she disagreed with the theory that agriculture was the main reason for the Phoenician colonisation of Portugal as propoposed by Carlos González Wagner and Jaime Alvar Ezquerra.