The two long-standing clichés that the Greeks were ‘masters of colonization’(E. Curtius) and the Phoenicians profit-driven traders still influence archaeologists’ mindsets today. These traditional views, as ever, only allow for the indigenous population groups to emerge in the light of mute statistics. Furthermore, according to their roles, as pre-defined by the Phoenicians or Greeks, the indigenous peoples only reacted in keeping with such roles and thus did not behave differently. Christoph Ulf’s cultural contact model, however, promises the genuine emancipation of the native peoples from their merely reactionary status as passive extras to bona fide partners interacting in colonial matters. Ulf’s model also makes available a superordinate analytical scheme. In some cases, this model allows for comparative analysis of the muchdiscussed case of Archaic western Sicily, at the basic structural level of colonial contacts, to be systematically considered in relation to the simultaneous Phoenicianindigenous region of interaction known as Tartessos in south-western Iberia. Such a comparison will make it evident that the ethnic origin of the actors is not the influential element underlying the sequence of the encounter with a foreign culture and the interaction with its specific cultural characteristics. Rather, first and foremost, there are additional background motives, which lead to contact in the overseas and the acquisition of land. Moreover, these motives dictate the newcomers’ form of living alongside or together with the old indigenous population. This insight also necessarily invites a revision of the view of the Greeks as presumed practitioners of a mission civilisatrice in the ‘Wild West’, as the case of ‘indirect rule’(to borrow the terminology of Lord Lugard) in Archaic Selinous will show.