Religion and the Making of Roman Africa

This book fundamentally rewrites the cultural and religious history of North Africa under the Roman Empire, focalized through rituals related to child sacrifice and the carved-stone monuments associated with such offerings. Earlier colonial archaeologies have stressed the failure of the empire to 'Romanize' Indigenous and Punic settler populations, mobilizing inscriptions and sculpture to mirror and explain modern European colonial failures as the result of ethnic African permanence. Instead, this book uses postcolonial theory, pragmatic semiotics, material epistemologies, and relational ontologies to develop a new account of how Roman hegemony transformed and was reproduced through signifying practices in even a seemingly traditional, 'un-Roman' rite such as child sacrifice. In doing so, the book offers a model for understanding the Roman Empire, the peoples who lived across its provinces, and their material worlds.

• Decolonizes North African archaeology by challenging and offering alternatives to the major narratives that underpin accounts of the region in antiquity
• Promotes the accessibility of Roman Africa, its history, and its archaeology, to anglophone audiences
• Reconceptualizes the history and archaeology of North Africa in ways that can offer a model for understanding other empires and their impacts, past and present