Rethinking ancient Rome and its colonies in Africa (phys.org)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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When French archaeologists first began digging into the baked earth of their new colonial empire in Algeria in the mid-19th century, they fancied that they'd found kindred spirits in the Roman Empire that had come some 2,000 years before them.

The French thought they were engaged in a "civilizing mission" through their colonial subjugation of the region, just as Rome had "Romanized" the indigenous Berber and Punic people by supposedly imposing its imperial culture upon them.

It wasn't until the independence of the countries of north Africa in the 1960s that a different story began to be told. Excavations at Althiburos in north-western Tunisia, for example, showed that a sophisticated infrastructure for agriculture and urbanism existed "as early as the first half of the last millennium BCE," long before the Romans arrived—and that, in fact, the Romans followed pre-existing street plans in many of the cities that pre-dated the Roman conquest.

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Interesting perspective and article. Good short read.

this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024

49 points (100.0% liked)

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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

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