This site is intended as a means to share my knowledge on Sardinia and the archaeology and history of the Sardinians and the Phoenicians in the West-Mediterranean. Archaeology and history have in common that the area studied is so vast that you need to limit yourself to a specific topic. Even then keeping to this topic is very hard because any given time or place has much to do with what came before and what is happening around it.

About the site

As a topic I chose Sardinia in the first millennium BC because I was attracted by the ruins of Tharros and it triggered my interest for the history of the island. I realised soon that a historian is not equipped to study archaeology, so I decided to follow archaeology and prehistory courses at the university (Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam). I learned about the Phoenician expansion to the west Mediterranean, which coincided with the colonization of the Greeks. I learned about urbanization in the first millennium BC and I learned about interregional trade. I have read books about the Phoenicians and the Sardinians. This and the visits to Sardinia and Sicily helped me understand more about the mechanisms that underlay the changes that took place three to two thousand years ago and led to the foundation of Tharros and several other towns. After my visit in 2006 to Sicily I decided to expand the topic to the Phoenician and Elimian sites as well.

The content of the site will be expanding continuously as I keep publishing new photo's, books and articles on the various topics. The updates can be followed through the site blog.

About the design

The internet has the advantage of being the most technologically advanced way of sharing knowledge and a very easy means of publishing in public. On the other hand it is difficult to establish the value of the information that is presented. It is really a matter of traceability. Science is called scientific because theories can be checked and verified. That should also be the standard to measure the quality of an internet page. Can you verify what is being given as information? That is the basic criterium for this website.

On the technical side I chose to combine my knowledge of databases and Archaeology, learned more about DHTML and javascript, and created most of the pages with php as a page generator and the database as a source. Since the transfer of the domain tharros.info to a professional provider I had the possibility of using relational databases on the web (MySQL) and I have been studying MySQL and PhP.

Next to that I created a nice little program for webstatistics called DbWcounter, as well as a blog, guestbook and forum. I noticed that the available software gives you much extra work because of the incessant spammers that know the standards and register their offensive texts and names.

About me

Let me introduce myself. I was born in the Netherlands (1962), but grew up in the first years of my life in Nigeria, Uganda and Cameroun. After that (1970) I finished school in the Netherlands and started a study in History of Art. I liked art, but I liked history more, so I turned to studying History. I ended up specialising in the history of international politics and economics and wrote a paper on the relations between South-America and the Netherlands in the period 1919-1939, digging through the archives and statistics of the time.

After finishing my studies I worked and lived for nine years in Milan (Italy) and met there my wife. She is from Sardinia. It followed that I visited Sardinia several times since 1989 and took interest in the Sardinian history.

Since 1998 I returned to the Netherlands and started working in the Information Technology, primarily with Lotus Notes. I have worked for IBM, ABNAMRO and EDS/HP since then. I started documenting myself on Sardinia and the Phoenicians and in 2001 I followed a part-time study Archaeology at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam. In the last years I have followed a few courses on professional writing and in 2006 one of my stories was published on the internet on the site of duizendwoorden.nl .

Aside my interest for archaeology and history my passion has always been for steamtrains and sailing boats (tall ships).

Amstelveen