Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewNumidia Romana? Die Auswirkungen der römischen Präsenz in Numidien (2. Jh. v. Chr.–1. Jh. n. Chr.) By Stefan Ardeleanu (Archäologische Forschungen 38). Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag 2021. Pp. 628. €98. ISBN 9783954905096 (cloth).Matthew M. McCartyMatthew M. McCartyUniversity of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreArchaeological accounts of North Africa in antiquity often begin from two problematic places: from culture histories, that seek to pair archaeological forms (whether house layouts, pottery technologies, or tomb types) with distinctive ethnic groups (“Punic,” “Numidian,” “Roman”), or from the kinds of political and military histories written from the thousands of extant inscriptions in the region, focused on onomastics or trajectories of civic promotion, and for which material culture becomes a simple illustration. These frameworks and metanarratives, long problematized by those working on other edges of Rome’s empire, are deeply engrained in regional archaeology: part of the lasting legacy of French colonialism and its ways of knowing that permeate even avowedly postcolonial accounts of Roman Africa. In this magisterial volume, Ardeleanu not only offers what will be a foundational reference for the archaeology and history of Numidia between ca. 200 BCE and 100 CE but also elegantly upends these traditional ways of understanding the region. Instead of broad cultural groupings, he demonstrates the need to recognize microregional patterns of practice within a host of interconnected communities (perhaps, he suggests, akin to “glocalization”). Instead of “Romanization,” he points to the importance of localized social differentiation for a growing “middle class” (143–48).The book is built from a detailed, copiously footnoted, and always skeptical re-analysis of nearly every known archaeological trace from Numidia: houses and their furnishings; cult sites, especially monumental podium temples (although Ardeleanu largely ignores the other main recognizable sanctuary type of this period, those open-air holocaust sanctuaries conventionally known as “tophets”); tombs, especially those that used figured or inscribed grave stelae; “economy,” seen through the lens of Simitthus’ giallo antico marble, ceramics, and coins; and urbanism, mostly in the form of city walls and public squares.Everyone who works in the region will have to contend with Ardeleanu’s thoughtful interpretations of individual sites and often radical rereadings of legacy data. For example, the “Hellenistic monument” under the Baths of Memmia at Bulla Regia is convincingly argued to be a house instead; the “Temple of Hoter Miskar” at Mactar is similarly reduced from a sprawling sanctuary complex to a small altar and unattached private residences; a range of imperial cult monuments are reconstructed in the Early Imperial forum at Hippo Regius; the recent Franco-Tunisian re-analysis of the development of Thugga’s forum (S. Aounallah and J.-C. Golvin, eds. Dougga: Études d’architecture religieuse, vol. 2, Ausonius 2016) is largely rejected. Indeed, Ardeleanu’s reinterpretation of Thugga (223–42) is particularly noteworthy, given the way that the site often serves as a paradigm for the region as a whole in modern accounts. For many, the urban changes observable at Thugga represent a kind of “coercive urbanism” (E. Fentress, “Coercive Urbanism: The Roman Impact on North African Towns,” in O. Belvedere and J. Bergemann, eds., Imperium Romanum: Romanization Between Colonization and Globalization, Palermo University Press 2022, 165–78) that saw Roman colonists violently displace and remake “native” communities—in this case, by destroying and building over an earlier Numidian agora. Instead, Ardeleanu argues for more peaceful accommodation and maintenance of long-standing traditions through the period of transition to empire. He reconstructs the second-century BCE Temple of Massinissa, attested in an inscribed dedication, not as a victory monument akin to the Kbor Klib or that at Simitthus, but as a distyle-in-antis temple. Ardeleanu suggests (223–42) that the temple was maintained far longer than previously thought: he dates the tribunal built over it not (as in previous accounts) to the Tiberian period, but to the later second century CE on the basis of its physical relation to the Antonine Capitolium. He also suggests that a small podium temple built directly to the south was not (as the Franco-Tunisian team argued) a pre-Roman temple to Saturn, but a first-century CE temple to Tiberius, known epigraphically. In so doing, Ardeleanu paints a rather different picture of society and religion in Thugga than those with broad currency: emperor worship was established in close relation, and as a pendant, to earlier king worship, rather than in violent opposition, for both settler-colonists and the earlier community of inhabitants. Indeed, the pre-Roman community at Thugga set a precedent for using this area as a point of ruler adulation that was taken up by later generations, becoming a key location for the display of imperial statuary.It is this ongoing respect for traditions—not as static practices or “continuities,” but as constantly innovated ways of building meaningful ties to imagined and materialized pasts—that ultimately creates the microregional identities, lifeways, and discrepant experiences that Ardeleanu so carefully observes. The patterns created in the third–first centuries BCE laid the foundations for what followed in the Early Imperial period and beyond: a vibrant, heavily urbanized, and well-connected world (not an “Afrique retardée”; 449) whose inhabitants navigated the period of incorporation into the Roman empire through changing forms of grouping together and social differentiation that rarely included broad ethnic or juridical categories, and more often depended on wealth and participation in (or emulation of) localized notions of what constituted eliteness. To figures like the occupants of Early Imperial tower-mausolea at Assuras, being juridically “Roman” or legal citizens seems to have mattered less than asserting wealth and monumental dominance of the landscape in terms that were recognizable locally: not only using the Punic cubit and double-torus base popular in earlier regional architecture but also embracing (and adapting) an earlier Numidian tradition of tower-tombs.Ardeleanu is also strongly interested in issues of historical agency and who drove the patterns of change and tradition-making he observes—and he locates much of the answer in the rise of a new and wealthier “middle class.” Changes did not suddenly happen in 146 BCE, with the destruction of Carthage, or in 46 BCE, with the creation of Africa Nova, or with the settling of colonies throughout this period. Patterns of imported ceramics, houses, and urban centers are hardly impacted by these political events—perhaps showing how little a role Carthage, the Numidian kings, Rome, or political actors played in shaping the lifeways, trade patterns, and experiences of North Africa’s inhabitants. Rather, those groups who emerge epigraphically (including the baali, “citizens” of towns) as collective builders of temples in the second and first centuries BCE, through more anonymous collective action like city-wall building, and through new types of funerary monuments, serve as the drivers of a changing material and social world. Many of the semi-elite houses identified at settlements throughout the region show signs of continuity and only minor renovation from the second and first centuries century BCE up to the late second century CE (in contrast to smaller houses, which were built over earlier). Perhaps, Ardeleanu suggests (146–48), this is evidence for local elite maintaining their positions in communities through the period of transition into a province, and another sign of less violent provincialization. These households all show evidence not only for craft production—perhaps part of the foundation of their wealth—but also for changing patterns of consumption. Campanian wine, imported in Dressel 1, and later in Dressel 2-4, amphoras, appears regularly in both high elite and semi-elite contexts, often imbibed from black-gloss Campana A drinking and dining sets—arriving in Africa as a result of what Ardeleanu sees as particularly tight (and long-lasting) commercial ties between Campania and Numidia. These ties were perhaps built on reciprocal exchange (primarily, it is assumed, for Numidian grain) rather than monetized commerce, given the dearth of Numidian coinage found in Italy (394). In drawing together disparate forms of data and beginning to describe the practices of this growing “middle class,” Ardeleanu opens new avenues for modeling the interrelationships of urbanism, social differentiation, and consumerism: a welcome antidote to accounts that still privilege “Romanization” as an explanatory framework.Ardeleanu’s picture of a fairly gentle, collaborative process of Numidia’s incorporation into empire—built from pre-existing traditions, with the participation of this new “middle class” and the seeming continuity of many of their practices through the period in question—will no doubt draw vocal criticism from those strains of postcolonial scholarship that stress the violence of colonialism and the “dark side of empire” (M. Fernández-Götz, D. Maschek, and N. Roymans, “The Dark Side of Empire: Roman Expansionism Between Object Agency and Predatory Regime, Antiquity 94, 2020, 1630–39). Not that Ardeleanu entirely ignores forms of exploitation and profiteering: he notes, for example, the way wealthy Italian landowners, such as Rubellius Blandus, enriched themselves by trading products between their African and Italian estates in ways that shaped the contours of long-distance trade and the availability of consumer goods to North Africa’s inhabitants (373). But violence, stark inequalities, and extreme power imbalances play only bit roles in Ardeleanu’s vision of ancient Numidia.Still, in showing what is possible when moving beyond those problematic colonial conceptual categories that have shaped interpretations of archaeological finds across Numidia, Ardeleanu offers one of the first truly postcolonial paths forward for North African studies. One can only hope that this monumental work will begin to shift the discourse for all who work in the region and serve as a model starting point for subsequent material histories of Rome’s African provinces.Notes[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 127, Number 1January 2023 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 89Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722736 Views: 89Total views on this site HistoryPublished online October 04, 2022 Copyright © 2023 by the Archaeological Institute of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.