Religion and the Making of Roman Africa: Votive Stelae, Traditions, and Empire [Hardcover]

Decolonizes Roman provincial archaeologies and histories by showing how empire reshaped rites related to child sacrifice in Roman Africa.The first English-language account of religious change in Roman North Africa, challenging 150 years of colonial scholarship and offering new paths forward for studying and decolonizing the archaeology and history of Roman provinces.The first English-language account of religious change in Roman North Africa, challenging 150 years of colonial scholarship and offering new paths forward for studying and decolonizing the archaeology and history of Roman provinces.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. Concorl“!