Overview

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.

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9781107020184

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Matthew M. McCarty is Assistant Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of British Columbia. He has directed the Apulum Roman Villa Project and the Apulum Mithraeum III Project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for which he won the Mary White Prize from the Classical Association of Canada.

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