Religion and the Making of Roman Africa is a decolonizing work that interrogates the persistence of orientalist paradigms in the study of Roman Africa, particularly the trope that North African religiosity was exotic and thus innately resistant to Romanization. Matthew McCarty frames decolonization as a ‘deconstructive practice’ and uses this approach to present new readings of Roman North African religion and its place within the construction of empire. He contends that interpretations of religious practice in Roman North Africa are still burdened by France’s inability to control the region during the 20th century CE. French archaeology in the wake of the country’s colonial efforts in the Magreb assumed that the worship of Baal provided a unifying base from which North Africa could withstand Romanization. This reading eliminates distinctions in local practice and ignores the means through which religion reproduced imperial power. Yet it also provides an archaeological answer for France’s political failures by establishing a resistance to western practices based in antiquity. McCarthy’s work reorients the discussion of religious practice to investigate religion’s success in reproducing empire in North Africa. Through an analysis of stelae and their associated molk-style rites, McCarthy argues that these traditions are not inherently resistant to Romanization but were active participants in making North Africa part of the Roman World.
In sum, this book provides an archaeological and historical catalog of religious practices alongside an investigation into how religious materials—specifically stelae—participated in the creation of social communities and the understanding of Roman imperial power in North Africa. Throughout, religion is written as constitutive of political, economic, and social discourses, instead of as ancillary to them. The work is divided into two parts. Part One (Colonial Histories, Introduction-Chapter 2) focuses on the background of molk-style rites and their prior interpretations. This section analyzes the colonial frameworks that remain common in the archaeology of Roman North Africa and recontextualizes the material. Part Two (Themes in the Making of Hegemony, Chapters 3-9) investigates meaning-making in the social communities of Roman North Africa through their stela usage. Each chapter focuses on a different element of practice or social identity.
This investigation covers a wide span of time, beginning with the origins of molk-style rites during the period of Phoenician colonization, from the 8th century BCE, through the 3rd century CE, after Roman imperial power had been thoroughly entrenched. Yet not every segment of time is engaged with equally, with certain timeframes highlighted where they exemplify a specific facet of religious practice or period of change. Likewise, the coverage of sites varies depending on the pertinent evidence, with McCarty making no claim to investigate the same sites in every chapter. Nevertheless, scope of the evidence is vast, and the selection of sites offers some thematic coherence across the book.
The Introduction (Colonial Traditions) starts with an explanation of molk-style rites, rituals related to the burnt offering of perinatal infants and ovacaprines, as well as these offerings’ deposition in a sanctuary space with an associated marker, the stele.[1] McCarty then lays out the methodology and the ethical stakes of the project, contending that religious traditions surrounding molk-style rites and the stelae used to commemorate them should not be viewed as relics carried over from an Eastern Mediterranean tradition that made the communities less receptive to Roman power. Instead, they represent dynamic signifying practices integral to producing communities and their identities within the Roman imperial system, even as practices reflect localized character. Particularly compelling is his claim that tradition can act as both an instantiation of social power and an instrument of social change without necessarily being understood as such by its agents (p. 6). Chapter 2 (Historicizing Stelae and Sanctuaries) provides a historicization of stele use across Roman North Africa, before and after Roman control. This chapter situates the stele’s association with molk-style rites both chronologically and within the broader Central Mediterranean context of the molk and tophet phenomena.
Turning to the volume’s second part, Chapter 3 (Making Africa with Punic Signs) examines the signs and symbolism of the stelae common across North African communities during the 1st century BCE. The symbol of Tanit carries significant analytical weight in this chapter, but the arguments formed around it are carried through to other signs that appear on the stelae. Notably, McCarty describes the ways these signs create a post-colonial “Third Space” in this period, reconnecting his argument with his decolonizing goal.[2] To this end, the chapter demonstrates how these symbols served as tools through which local groups could navigate and resist the binary of imperial affiliation during the 1st century BCE.
Chapter 4 (Making a God) uses stelae to investigate the character of the gods worshipped in Roman North Africa, detailing the evolution of Baal Hamon into the Roman sphere to challenge prior narratives of straight-forward syncretism with Saturn. These narratives provide support for the colonial narratives of continuity over time that McCarthy is challenging. The stelae instead provide evidence for the complex negotiation of divine identity which affected appropriate worship-practice for these communities. Chapter 5 (Making Sanctuary Communities) examines shifts in the depiction of worshippers. Where the Republican period stelae tend to construct a more horizontal sense of community among worshippers, over the imperial period, social hierarchies are displayed on and reproduced through the stelae. The ways in which these develop challenge prior assumptions about uniformity between the communities, emphasizing the local variation and cultic flexibility across North Africa while pointing out different responses to the same imperial pressures.
Chapter 6 (Making Children Subjects of Empire) focuses on how stelae reflect changing conceptualizations around children’s social roles and how stelae were used to induct children into their place within the Roman empire. The visual language of pets, garments, and posture is used to show how these representations evolved to include children as future Roman citizens rather than sacrificial subjects. This chapter also overturns prior readings of signs like amulets as markers of non-Roman identity, establishing how they are claims to Roman citizenship when read through the context of broader imperial iconography.[3]
Chapter 7 (Making Offerings) addresses how the stelae participated in altering practices through their representations of ritual, while Chapter 8 (Remaking Spaces) continues this trajectory by examining how stelae placement and conceptualization reshaped the sanctuary space itself. McCarty begins by arguing that depictions of practice on the stelae were neither mere decoration nor documentary accounts of rites but worked instead to indicate elements of significance for worshipers and foci for ritual actions. These representations mark a reconceptualization of the ritualized relations between the gods and their worshippers. In Chapter 7, primarily through an extensive case study of Hadrumentum, he demonstrates a move from verbalized prayer to large communal offerings, but the shifts in practice are further contextualized across North Africa. The decolonizing weight of these chapters is carried by Chapter 8, where the changes in sanctuary space that were previously attributed to effective Romanization are instead understood through changing conceptions of ritual significance and place within the Empire.
Chapter 9 (Making Empire) is a brief conclusion that reiterates the harm of prior frameworks in perpetuating narratives of cross-regional uniformity and Orientalism to establish North Africa as an environment incompatible with Western ideologies and power structures. By highlighting some overarching reinterpretations that have come out of his study, particularly ones that overturn narratives of continuity across the ancient past and the misreading of signs, this final section reiterates that evidence of religious practice must be embedded in the material reality of imperial spread instead of in an ahistorical religious ideal.
Religion and the Making of Roman Africa provides both an analysis of religious stele usage and a model for decolonial work in Classical Archaeology. There have been many scholars who engage with the issues Romanization presents when interpreting the material culture of empire, and McCarty’s book both incorporates the prior theoretical efforts and speaks to the concerns that others working in Roman North Africa are still raising.[4] Yet his work goes beyond this to propose new post-colonial and decolonial theoretical directions that he tests across the thematic elements in Part Two. In laying out the ways that a colonial reading has convoluted the interpretations of material culture of this region, McCarty makes it clear why this intervention is necessary. Furthermore, the book does not shy away from providing new analyses on a wide variety of topics whose former interpretations do not align with the material reality. Through ancient religious practice, McCarthy has taken the work of decolonization seriously and put forth new directions for interpreting the religious evidence of Roman North Africa.
Bibliography
Ardeleanu, S. (2021). Numidia Romana? Die Auswirkungen der römischen Präsenz in Numidien (2. Jh. v. Chr.–1. Jh. n. Chr.). Wiesbaden.
Betts, R.F. (2012). Decolonization: A brief history of the Word. In E. Bogaerts& R. Raben (Eds.), Beyond Empire and Nation: The decolonization of African and Asian societies, 1930s–1970s (pp. 23-38). Brill.
Bhabha, Homi K. (2004). The Location of Culture. Routledge.
Lemos, R. (2023). Can We Decolonize the Ancient Past? Bridging Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory in Sudanese and Nubian Archaeology. Cambridge Archaeological Jour.
Notes
[1] These spaces are conventionally known as tophets. The author does address the debates around tophet usage in Ch. 2, acknowledging the historical dissent and clearly illustrating a belief that these spaces did function as deposition sites for human and animal offerings.
[2] On “Third Space,” see Bhabha 2004.
[3] Where these amulets had previously been taken to represent initiation into an eastern mystery cult, there is substantial evidence that they should instead be read as bullae, a common protective amulet for Roman boys (pp. 233-236)
[4] For Roman Africa, see examples like Ardeleanu 2021, Lemos 2023.