The forty-first annual Jerome Lectures were packed this year as David Mattingly, professor of Roman archaeology and history at the University of Leicester, delivered a series of paradigm-busting presentations on Roman North Africa “Romanization” is the term that scholars have long used to describe a unilateral, seemingly inevitable process by which the disparate cultures of the Mediterranean became Roman—adopting Roman dress and names, building Roman-style houses and cities as they fell under Roman domination. Mattingly, one of the foremost archaeologists working in North Africa today and doing highly innovative and revealing work in the Saharan oases, presented a thoughtful and thorough critique of the “Romanization” of North Africa. In place of Romanization he offered the model of “discrepant identities” in which groups might hold multiple, even contradictory identities, heavily informed by local language, culture and history. His vision of Roman rule in the African provinces thus argued that local cultures and languages were more enduring, divisions and tensions between locals and Romans more stark, and the violence and upheaval of Roman domination more rending than we have heretofore supposed.
Mattingly’s lectures presented not only a stunningly new broad sweep across Roman North Africa, but did so by focusing on evidence not widely included in the status quo histories. His first lecture set the tone, focusing on the desert oases and predesert communities that his own archaeological work has done so much to illuminate. Far from wastelands, Mattingly showed how new analysis of satellite imagery, plus new survey and excavations have revealed a densely settled landscape of agriculturalists and pastoralists thriving long before the Roman conquest. Rome’s “revolution” here, he suggests, was far less revolutionary than we might have thought.
Moving to the question of the Roman military and its occupation, Mattingly presented new evidence for a densely fortified military frontier the Romans established at the edge of the agricultural settlements, placing a line where before lay a fluid intermixture of sedentary agriculture and mobile pastoral economies. He outlined the profound differences between soldiers and their neighboring local populations—differences in language, in burial habits and religion—differences that described an occupying population not integrating, but setting themselves apart.
Mattingly’s third lecture took up the problem of the countryside. Diversity was the theme here, with the many varied local habits of settlement, language and land tenure continuing to dominate, even after centuries of Roman occupation. The countryside of North Africa retained many local customs, Mattingly argued, some inherently contrary to Roman rule, as he highlighted the continuation, perhaps even expansion, of child-sacrifice to Saturn-type deities in parts of the interior. The specter of these hundreds, if not thousands of children sacrificed in direct contradiction to Roman religious tradition vividly described a world of wholly different values retained and practiced in resistance to Roman homogenizing impulses.
Finally, Mattingly presented a sweeping overview of Roman cities in North Africa. Long a symbol of the might of Rome, restored and embraced by modern colonial powers whose project was not so different from the Romans’, Roman cities of North Africa were subject to a wholly new narrative. By emphasizing the majority of cities not included in typical histories and driving home his points with stacks of data, Mattingly showed the cities of North Africa to be as immune to Romanizing impulses as the country. The vast majority of the five hundred or so North African cities were small, retained their pre-Roman location and layout, and lacked most of the urban amenities—like theaters and baths—we associate with the “Romanizing” project. The persistence of local languages like Punic and Libyan in commemorative inscriptions, of monumental megalithic burial traditions, and the persistence of multiple linguistic identities in the epigraphic evidence all described a dense and vibrant local world covered by a thin veneer of Latinity and Roman culture.
Mattingly lectured to full houses all four nights, with overflowing audiences of AAR Fellows, local graduate students and professori alike. He debated the theoretical underpinnings of his project in a packed Saturday seminar that visited the Roma Caput Mundi exhibition in the Colosseum, using its curatorial precepts as a backdrop to talk about accepted models of Roman hegemony.
In their breadth and courage of intellectual vision and their deployment of a huge range of data—from the bones of a child sacrifice to the relief sculptures of a desert tomb—Mattingly’s lectures were the highlight of the Ancient Studies calendar, one which has left us all inspired and enlivened.