Religion and the Making of Roman Africa
Votive Stelae, Traditions, and Empire

Decolonizes Roman provincial archaeologies and histories by showing how empire reshaped rites related to child sacrifice in Roman Africa.

Matthew M. McCarty (Author)

9781107020184, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 November 2024

482 pages, 32 b/w illus. 46 colour illus. 13 maps
25 x 17.6 x 3.1 cm, 0.99 kg

'Its value lies … in challenging previous interpretative frameworks and providing a host of novel approaches - and it is this field in which [the author] excels. Religion and the Making of Roman Africa deserves to be widely read not only by specialists on the archaeology of Northern Africa and the history of religion, but by Roman archaeologists more generally.' Maximilian Rönnberg, Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft

This book fundamentally rewrites the cultural and religious history of North Africa under the Roman Empire, focalized through rituals related to child sacrifice and the carved-stone monuments associated with such offerings. Earlier colonial archaeologies have stressed the failure of the empire to 'Romanize' Indigenous and Punic settler populations, mobilizing inscriptions and sculpture to mirror and explain modern European colonial failures as the result of ethnic African permanence. Instead, this book uses postcolonial theory, pragmatic semiotics, material epistemologies, and relational ontologies to develop a new account of how Roman hegemony transformed and was reproduced through signifying practices in even a seemingly traditional, 'un-Roman' rite such as child sacrifice. In doing so, the book offers a model for understanding the Roman Empire, the peoples who lived across its provinces, and their material worlds.

List of figures
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Part I. Colonial Histories: 1. Colonial traditions
2. Historicizing stelae and sanctuaries
Part II. Themes in the Making of Hegemony: 3. Making Africa with Punic signs
4. Making a God
5. Making sanctuary communities
6. Making children subjects of empire
7. Making offerings
8. Remaking spaces and societies
9. Making empire: signs, stelae, and traditions
Appendix 1. Dating stele-sanctuaries
Appendix 2. Concordance of ancient/modern place names
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA]