The study of North Africa in the Roman Empire has long been grounded in the region's epigraphic remains: a twin legacy of the material and modern colonialisms. The confluence of ancient practices and geology generated more inscribed Latin texts in Africa Proconsularis than in any other province of the empire; the ‘discovery’ and decipherment of these texts by European scholars became a guarantor of European patrimony. In one vignette, the nineteenth-century epigraphist Léon Renier is said to have impressed an Algerian sheikh by being able to understand Latin inscriptions, prompting the sheikh to respond, ‘In taking this land, [the French] have only taken back the property of their fathers!’ (G. Boissière, L'Algérie romaine [1883], p. xvii). Simply recounting and describing the content of an inscribed text was enough to stake claims of juridical inheritance and ownership over past and present. With histories of the Roman Maghreb traditionally built from (and constrained by) the particular types of information contained in inscribed texts, it is not surprising that the Africa Romana XXI congress (Tunis 2018) – the main international conference on Roman Africa – should have focused almost entirely on epigraphy. The proceedings, a grab-bag of 54 short contributions, shows by some measures how far North African epigraphy has come since Renier's day: it has a laudably international slate of contributors, foregrounding the voices of Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan scholars. By other measures, though, the volume reflects how deeply interpretative paradigms that arose in this colonial milieu remain ingrained in the study of the Maghreb.

The range of contributions covers expected ground: the governance and status of towns, elite practices of benefaction, prosopography, onomastics, religion (including Christianity) and funerary commemoration, primarily during the High Empire but also including contributions on the Hellenistic/Republican period and late antiquity. The contributions are full of rich details about the civic, social and familial history of towns, extracted by describing, performing onomastic analysis, counting … that particular brand of epigraphy focused on inductively explicating the content of texts as transparent historical documents.

In the tradition of North African studies, contributions often foreground the juridical status of towns, groups and individuals as primary historical motors. People are reduced to and historically determined by those status markers built into names (citizen with tria nomina, peregrine, slave, freed, possible immigrant or of indigenous origin), into titles (equestrian, cultor, ‘wife’-of-a-soldier), into civic entities (pagus, civitas, municipium, colonia): the statuses recorded on stone monuments. There are few attempts to theorise; to grapple with how different forms of status might shape the hegemony of empire; to explore the intersectionality of different types of status in localised heterarchies; or to unpack the myriad forms that discrepant forms of identification might take (consider J.P. Moore in AntAfr 35 [1999]; D.J. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power and Identity [2011]). Explicitly inscribed status simply is: the end of enquiry, something natural. There could be no clearer sign of how deeply the ancient hegemonies that defined such statuses, and their colonial receptions, continue to shape our understandings and draw boundaries around modes of interrogation.

This focus on documentary epigraphic content also continues to reproduce a particular model of North African history: one that privileges the statal hand of Rome in shaping provincial worlds. With most of the statuses discussed largely contingent on legal recognition by the Roman state, it is no wonder that the state emerges as the assumed driver of socio-cultural change. Take, for example, Aounallah's contribution: one of the most sensitive of this kind. As regards the definition of the status of land, urban agglomerations and peoples in the Republican period, he argues that being recognised as a ‘free’ civic entity did not mean municipal status or tax immunity (a meaning of the term acquired later); it meant governance by autochthonous institutions and customs, not subject to the provincial governor. To prove this point, Aounallah looks to archaeology and the changes in worship patterns visible in the excavated tophet sanctuary of Hadrumetum. After the Third Punic War, when the town was recognised as ‘free’, the Hadrumetans continued to sacrifice infants in their tophet; when the town was reorganised as a municipium, it became subject to the provincial governor/laws, leading to a switch from child to animal offerings; and finally, when promoted to a colonia, the Hadrumetans abandoned their tophet altogether. While an elegantly straightforward means of marrying epigraphic histories to archaeological data, the model falters when tested against other sites, including Thugga (McCarty in SEL 29–30 [2012–13]) and the colonia at Thamugadi; other explanations that recognise processes of social negotiation and the agency of worship communities better explain differential paces of ritual change (e.g. B.D. Shaw in JRA 29 [2016]). While Aounallah's clever argument about the meaning of juridical libertas in the late Republic holds true based on other evidence, the tendency to predicate nearly all social and religious practices on Rome's assignment of a particular status as well as the faith that historical causation must lie in the documentary detail of inscriptions run throughout the volume.

This is not to say that all contributions build from such premises; quite a few explore the possibilities for inscriptions to be points of active identity- and community-construction, of triangulation and negotiation within the overlapping power structures of a wider empire. J. Carlsen, for example, demonstrates the creation of distinctive ‘emotional communities’ through the use of descriptive terms in epitaphs from the Cemetery of the Officials at Carthage and its contrast with habits at Rome: evidence for how, even within an imperial, administrative milieu, practices and the expression of sentiment might be shaped by localised interactions and expectations. S. Lefebvre offers a model for how analysing contexts and practices can reveal complex processes of communication, negotiation and reception, taking as a case study the differential erasure and re-carving of the names of the III Legio and Maximinus Thrax. She illustrates the roles that raw emotion, exemplarity and the varied reception of orders from the ‘centre’ played in communications among emperors, governors and local authorities.

At the same time, some of the new finds presented promise to shed greater light on the socio-economic dimensions of North Africa's history. A. Chérif and H. González Bordas signal the discovery of a new inscription that seems to give the text of the Lex Hadriana de rudibus agris (rather than just procurators’ interpretations of it, known from four other inscriptions) – a law that may have played a significant role in shaping Africa's agricultural boom. Although the authors do not give the full text of the new find (it is promised as forthcoming), they offer a description of its findspot (reused at Hr. Hnich, probably a farmstead on an imperial estate near Mustis) and of several funerary monuments found nearby. When set alongside results from the Rus Africum survey around Thugga, the finds from Hr. Hnich will offer a picture of the dynamics of rural society in an important agricultural zone: the foundations from which future social histories might be built.

In the end, North African epigraphy, its questions and the histories they generate look little different in 2020 than they did in Renier's day. Thanks to this volume, our chronologies of provincial governors have been refined; we can reconstruct a mausoleum at Cuicul; we have a few more epitaphs; and we can think about euergetic foundations through a newly proposed typology. The minor details, collations of data and small arguments that are the backbone of each paper here will no doubt form obligatory footnotes in subsequent specialist works on the African provinces of Rome. But whether such epigraphic positivism can ever produce a postcolonial ‘rifuto di un'egemonio culturale dell'Occidente’, as the editors hope, remains an open question.