For much of the twentieth century, Numidia was a little-known world of local kings that even after conquest became insufficiently Roman to attract serious attention. New surveys, excavations, and major international collaborations led by Tunisia's Institut National de Patrimoine (INP) have now drastically altered this picture. The turning point was the carbon-dating of settled agriculture at the highland city of Althiburos in western Tunisia to the ninth or even tenth century b.c.e. (e.g. J. Sanmartí et al., Journal of African Archaeology 10 (2012), 21–44), before Levantine settlement on the coast. An increasing number of sites now reveal local communities well beyond Carthaginian or even regal control developing their own landscapes and networks, especially near the coast and along major rivers. By the time Numidia became a Roman province it was already highly urbanised with walled and gridded settlements boasting monumental architecture.
Stefan Ardeleanu's bold, brilliant monograph synthesises and analyses this new work, focussing on the period from the emergence of large local kingdoms during the second Punic war to the foundation of Timgad in 100 c.e., a type-site for the ‘Roman city’. After a stout rejection of such ethno-cultural approaches to ‘Roman’, ‘Punic’, or ‘Berber’ North Africa, A. advocates instead a local and regional approach. He roughly divides the lands from the fossa regia to the Ampsaga river into six regions on the basis of geography and ancient terminology, and then surveys some or all of them in relation to five themes: residential architecture and workshops; temples and cult (except tophets); burial practices and necropoleis; economy and trade; settlements and urbanism (on which see also A.'s chapter in J. Lehmann and P. Scheding (eds), Explaining the Urban Boom (2023), 111–132). Specialists in the different datasets and ‘cultures’ of ancient North Africa have traditionally ignored one another as well as theoretical and technical developments elsewhere in ancient Mediterranean studies; A.'s interdisciplinary detective work, his tireless attention to detail and his confident embrace of multiple methodologies, genres of evidence and scholarly languages yield a torrent of new interpretation.
The neglected evidence for domestic architecture in particular provides surprises: the base of a supposed ‘Hellenistic Monument’ at Bulla Regia is reinterpreted as residential walling, as is a ‘city wall’ at Simitthus, while houses and shops occupy most of the imagined extent of the pre-Roman Hoter Miskar sanctuary at Maktar. The recently identified ‘agora numide’ at Thugga probably didn't exist at all, while all certain examples of public squares from that era are connected to temples and sanctuaries, with no traces of separate buildings for assembly or administration. These cult buildings were not dedicated to later local superstars like the Dii Mauri or Cere(re)s; far from being Roman versions of local gods as usually thought, those were post-conquest innovations. And although Numidia's primary economic axis was always with central Italy, A. reconstructs commercial and cultural links throughout the Iron Age western Mediterranean that bypassed Roman money and power.
A. takes a particularly sceptical approach to the social and economic effects of political change. The destruction of Carthage in 146 makes no appreciable difference to the import of Campana A pottery from Italy, largely through Hippo Regius, nor to the evidence from amphoras for exchange with the new Roman province. Numidia's own integration into the Roman empire in 46 b.c.e. finds equally little reflection in the archaeological record, and even large-scale immigration, first by Greek and Italian traders and then in the form of organised settlement under Caesar and Augustus, makes little difference to existing social dynamics. A. acknowledges the financial and legal benefits of Roman citizenship, but his settlers integrated into Numidian society alongside land-owning locals, and even the principes gentium or ‘tribal chiefs’, with no observable distinction of architecture or dress. Unlike Elizabeth Fentress in O. Belvedere and J. Bergemann (eds), Imperium Romanum: Romanization between Colonization and Globalization (2021), 165–78, A. finds no evidence for ‘coercive urbanism’, concerted destruction or dramatic interventions in Numidian settlements. In the case of Thugga, for instance he makes a strong case that the temple erected to Massinissa in 139 b.c.e., often thought to have been destroyed in the early imperial period, in fact remained a central civic monument well into the second century c.e. as the pre-existing population and Italian settlers worked together to build imperial cult in the city on local traditions of ruler-worship.
A.'s work has much in common with David Mattingly's broader recent overview of ancient North African history and archaeology (Between Sahara & Sea, 2023). There are differences of opinion — on the extent of early urbanism and then of Roman control in the southern frontier zone, for instance — but A.'s deep dive into the Numidian detail supports M.'s bigger picture of imperial prosperity built on a pre-Roman base of dense urbanism, agriculture, route-networks and industry. They also agree on the extent to which a few unusual sites like Timgad have obscured how ‘un-Roman’ African urbanism looks even in the high empire, and both focus on heterogeneity within North African society rather than extracting essential cultural traits: we are finally, it seems, post-Romanization.
Not all of A.'s suggestions in this magnificently produced monograph will find universal acceptance, but this is the most important contribution to Numidian studies for decades, and it will frame all future discussion.
