ABSTRACT
Twenty years after the end of the Spanish-French excavation at La Picola (Santa Pola, Alicante) and 14 years after its publication in the form of a monograph (Badie et al. 2000), it is time to make an assessment of the debates that have addressed the function of a coastal settlement that has no parallels in Iberia at the time where it was built and occupied, from ca. 430 to ca. 330 BC, taking into account the results of more recent archaeological investigations in south-east Spain as well as in other regions of the Western Mediterranean.
