I was a University of Michigan Carthage Fellow in 1977–78 during the period of the Save Carthage UNESCO project. My wife and I lived in Carthage, near the Punic ports where I worked on my dissertation and dug for some months with the British archaeological team on the north side of the Circular Harbour. We subsequently resided in adjacent towns such as La Marsa and Gammarth – all tied to the ancient city – at various times over the next decade. Hence, when I was invited to review this book (my earlier associations with Carthage unbeknownst to the editor), I leapt at the opportunity.
This is a good book, and I can attest personally to many aspects of the history and historiography of the site recounted in it. In the late 1970s, the chronic conflict – stretching back to the nineteenth century, detailed in the book – over the preservation of the site from further development was still being played out, despite the launch of the UNESCO campaign. The clandestine robbing at the site and illicit sale of antiquities, also of long standing, and the diplomatic and expatriate market for it was an open secret. But perhaps most tellingly, colonialism remained profound in its impact on the perspective of both Tunisian and international (read European and North American) historians and archaeologists on the site and legacy of ancient Carthage, and still does.
That a book could be dedicated almost wholly, apart from its first chapter, to the history of a major ancient city – Punic and Roman Carthage – after its heyday when it was largely (despite ongoing low level habitation) abandoned and thus became equally famous as a melancholy yet still impressive field of ruins, is a remarkable history in and of itself, and the authors are to be lauded for addressing this fully. Over eight subsequent chapters they reveal the site of Carthage as a layered, ‘constructed’ place, both material and imagined, whose meaning has changed under successive regimes and excavators.
They repeatedly stress the interplay between legend and landscape, politics and archaeology, and how the study of Carthage reflects shifting global ideologies. Indeed, they have produced what is at once a deeply researched historical synthesis and a reflective archaeology of archaeology itself. Published as part of Bloomsbury’s Archaeological Histories series, this compact yet ambitious study belongs to a genre that examines not only the physical remains of major sites but the equally layered histories of their excavation, interpretation and ideological appropriation. It joins Knossos, Troy and Ur in exploring the longue durée of a place whose material fabric and imagined identity have been continually reconstituted by successive civilisations, empires and modern states.
Bingham and MacDonald approach Carthage not as a single archaeological entity but as a palimpsest of overlapping histories – Punic, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman, French colonial and post-independence Tunisian. The introduction frames the book explicitly as an inquiry into how the city of Carthage was inhabited, abandoned, imagined, and created in the period after it stopped being an ancient city, and what impact that had on the archaeology and its interpretations’ (1). Carthage, they argue, differs from cities such as Athens or Rome precisely because its ancient remains do not announce themselves so visibly in the landscape. The ruins are fragmented, dispersed and entangled within modern suburban fabric, a ‘hidden’ archaeology inseparable from the politics of memory, ownership and modern development.
This book stands out for its meta-archaeological perspective. Bingham and MacDonald are less interested in rehashing debates over chronology or typology than in examining how those debates themselves emerged. Throughout, they adopt what might be called a ‘biographical’ method: each chapter centres on key agents through whom larger structures of knowledge and power are refracted. This approach humanises the longue durée without sacrificing analytical depth.
This interpretive frame situates Carthage as a ‘constructed’ site whose meaning has been refracted through the motivations of its excavators, collectors, priests, colonial administrators and nationalist archaeologists. In the authors’ telling, the city’s afterlife becomes a laboratory for understanding how archaeology itself evolved as a discipline entangled with empire, religion and identity politics. The book’s argument unfolds chronologically, but with a clear thematic rhythm that alternates between the ancient history of Carthage and the modern histories of those who have sought to reclaim it. If there is a limitation, it lies in the compression of so much of the history and historiography of Carthage across time necessitated by the series format. That said, the book achieves remarkable breadth within 150 pages.
The chapters trace Carthage’s history from its Phoenician foundation to the twenty-first century, moving through three large narrative arcs: (1) the ancient and medieval city; (2) the rediscovery of Carthage in the early modern and colonial periods; and (3) post-colonial and UNESCO-era archaeology. Each chapter is organised around significant rulers, scholars and excavators whose interventions defined the city’s scholarly and political image.
The first chapter, ‘From Carthage to Rome: A Brief Overview’, provides a brisk, pro forma summary of Carthage’s ancient history, beginning with the Phoenician foundation by settlers from Tyre in the late ninth century BC, the city’s emergence as a maritime and commercial power and its long rivalry with Rome, culminating in the Punic Wars and the city’s destruction in 146 BC. It also establishes the volume’s methodological concern: the ancient city’s narrative survives overwhelmingly through the voices of its conquerors. Carthage’s own voice was ‘long lost to legend and myth’ (11), a silencing that recurs in later episodes of its rediscovery. As the authors astutely observe, ‘there is not one Carthage but hundreds of them and each version might hold a different meaning for the observer’ (5).
The second chapter, ‘From Carthage to Tunis: A New Focus’, addresses the transformation of the site in the wake of the Arab-Muslim conquest (late seventh century AD) and the rise of nearby Tunis, weaving together Islamic historiography, archaeology and the longue durée of local memory. Figures such as the Berber leader Kahina and the historian Ibn Khaldūn illustrate how the memory of Carthage survived within the Maghribi cultural imagination. Rather than portraying the Islamic period as a rupture, the authors emphasise the modest continuity of urban life and the adaptive reuse of ancient materials.
The middle chapters describe how Carthage became a stage on which an increasingly expansionist European agenda appropriated Carthage for moral and imperial purposes. Chapter 3 traces the site’s early modern rediscovery by travellers, artists and antiquarians. The authors vividly evoke the Romantic imagination of Carthage through figures such as J.M.W. Turner, whose Dido Building Carthage encapsulated both fascination and moral allegory in its evocation of Carthage as the doomed mirror of empire.
Chapter 4, ‘Rivals in the Field’, recounts the nineteenth-century ‘archaeological race’ between British and French excavators. The rather unsavoury figure, Nathan Davis, operating under the patronage of the British Museum, and Charles-Ernest Beulé, representing the French state, are cast as emblematic of competing imperial archaeologies. Their excavations on the Byrsa Hill and publication wars embodied the geopolitical rivalry of the 1850s. Bingham and MacDonald handle these episodes with a balanced mixture of narrative and critique: the archaeological work is described in detail, but so are the political stakes and personal ambitions driving it.
Chapter 5, ‘The French Collector’, follows the consolidation of French hegemony in the Protectorate era (post-1881). Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) is treated not merely as literature but as a colonial text that envisaged Carthage in a rather exotic Orientalist perspective. Excavators such as Pricot de Sainte-Marie and the colonial administrators who established the Carthage Museum appear as mediators between scholarship and spectacle. The authors’ juxtaposition of Flaubert’s fictional Carthage with the bureaucratic archaeology of the Protectorate years powerfully exposes how colonial imagination and material appropriation operated in tandem.
In Chapter 6, the authors’ attention turns to Père Alfred-Louis Delattre, the ‘excavating priest’ of the White Fathers, who dominated Carthaginian archaeology from the 1870s to the 1920s. They portray Delattre not merely as a pious antiquarian but rightly as part missionary, part scientist and part colonial agent. Under Cardinal Lavigerie’s patronage, Delattre’s excavations around the Chapel of St Louis and the establishment of the Carthage Museum were acts of both faith and empire.
Chapter 7, ‘The Tophet and the Early Twentieth Century’, shifts from biography to the discovery of the Carthaginian Tophet, long central to debates about Punic religion. The authors recount how early-twentieth-century excavators such as the Mexican-born American adventurer, Count Byron de Prorok, sensationalised the Tophet as evidence of child sacrifice, reinforcing moralising narratives about Carthaginian cruelty that date back to Roman propaganda. But this is offset by the important countervailing role played by Francis Kelsey of the University of Michigan and the Scottish archaeologist, Donald B. Harden, in conducting the first systematic excavations of the Tophet.
The penultimate chapter, ‘Independence, UNESCO, and the Twenty-First Century’, brings the story into the post-colonial era, beginning with Tunisian independence in 1956 and culminating in the UNESCO Carthage Campaign of 1972–1992. The narrative foregrounds important Tunisian archaeologists such as Abdelmajid Ennabli, whose decades of genuine and far-sighted leadership transformed Carthage into both a national heritage site and a field of international collaboration. The authors are particularly adept at tracing the interplay between local politics and global heritage institutions.
The brief concluding chapter, ‘Epilogue: Continuing Carthage’ returns to the theme of multiplicity and reaffirms the book’s core insight: that Carthage’s power lies precisely in its heterogeneity, its ability to accommodate – and survive – successive acts of redefinition.
This book thus succeeds admirably in its dual mission: to offer an accessible introduction for general readers and a historiographical synthesis for specialists. Its chief strength lies in its balanced attention to both the ancient city and the modern histories of its study. The inclusion of figures such as Kahina, Ibn Khaldūn, Delattre and Ennabli expands the usual cast of Western archaeologists to include North African and Islamic voices.
Carthage is not just a history of a site but a meditation on how we construct the past. It invites readers to consider how empires, ancient, colonial and modern, inscribe themselves upon landscapes, and how archaeology can both reveal and perpetuate those inscriptions. Bingham and MacDonald reveal at once an ancient metropolis, a colonial theatre and a living suburb, a ‘city of legend, of curses, of martyrdoms and conquests’ (1) whose ruins refuse to settle into a single narrative. Indeed, from a semiotic archaeological perspective it will probably remain an ancient and modern built environment whose signs convey divergent cultural meanings depending upon whether one is a graduate as I once was when there, or a contemporary Tunisian or European scholar, as well as on past perspectives which still exert a powerful influence on the site.
