In the monograph, 512 pages in high quality colour edition, a total of 108 burials and 9 funerary deposits are studied, covering more than a thousand years of the ancient history of the region. It is, in fact, the longest necropolis studied to date in the Iberian Peninsula.
The volume presents a catalogue of the structures and objects and the funerary practices and rituals of six phases, three pre-Roman and three Roman, which overlap and cut across each other from the 7th century BC to the 5th century AD. This meant an enormous complexity for the excavations, but it allows us to analyse the evolution of the funerary world from the Phoenician to the Late Roman period, and its relationship with the settlement.
The book has been published by the University of Jaén with the collaboration of the Town Council of La Vila Joiosa, and has been written by a team of 10 specialists coordinated by the professor of the University of Alicante, Ignasi Grau Mira, and the archaeologist of the Municipal Service of Archaeology and Historical Heritage of La Vila Joiosa, Diego Ruiz Alcalde. The presentation was given by both of them, as well as by the councillor for Historical Heritage, Xente Sebastià, and Juan Pedro Bellón Ruiz, Deputy Director of Research at the University Institute for Research in Iberian Archaeology at the University of Jaén, a leading institution in research into the Iberian world in Spain.
The Councillor for Historical Heritage, Xente Sebastià, highlighted the "fruits of collaboration between institutions", in this case, the Vila Joiosa Town Council, through Vilamuseu, and the Universities of Alicante and Jaén; and welcomed the publication followed by two sites "of prime national and international importance", such as the necropolis of Casetes and the Bou Ferrer shipwreck.
Professor Ignasi Grau, for his part, stated that the necropolis of La Vila Joiosa "currently holds the key to understanding, better than anywhere else, the processes of formation of the Iberian world", and pledged to continue this collaboration in order to continue jointly publishing other excavated sectors of the necropolis of Casetes and Poble Nou.