Classics

http://bollettinodiarcheologiaonline.beniculturali.it/colonising-a-colonised-territory-settlements-with-punic-roots-in-roman-times/

Abstract

Traditional approaches to the process known as ‘Romanisation’ usually have taken into account the interaction between Roman colonists and native populations around the Mediterranean. Roman colonisation, however, took place in vast regions over a territory previously colonised by Carthage. How did the settlement of Punic population in certain cities affect the redefinition of identities in Republican and early Imperial times? Is there a distinctive way of ‘becoming Roman’ in these areas? Could certain trends in rituals, town planning or settlement in the landscape be observedin these contexts? How was the coexistence of different identities – Roman/Punic/local – negotiated in these populations? How was this multilayered identity expressed through material culture and to what extent might it have influenced the way these groups interacted with Roman colonists? All these issues are directly relevant to a postcolonial analysis of cities, rural settlements and ritual places with Punic roots in Roman times, where aspects like hybridisation, mimicry, coexistence of several ‘discourses’ in a given city, or expression of different types of social identity through material culture and the ‘rituals’ of the daily life, should be stressed.

Contents

1. Alicia Jiménez (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas)

Introduction: Colonising e Colinised Territory. Settlements with Punic Roots in Roman Times

2. Carlos Cañete Jiménez (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas)

Retelling the tale: Modernity, Colonialism and Discourse about Roman Expansion

3. Rossella Colombi (Independent Researcher)

Indigenous Settlements and Punic Presence in Roman Republican Northern Sardinia

4. Alicia Jiménez (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas)

Roman Settlements/Punic Ancestors: some examples from the Necropolis of Southern Iberia

5. Carmen Aranegui, Jaime Vives-Ferrándiz Sánche (Museum of Prehistory, Valencia)

Romanisation in the Far West: Local Practices in Western Mauritatia (2nd c. .B.C.E. - 2nd c. .C.E.)

6. Josephine Quinn (University of Oxford)

The Reinvention of Lepcis

7. Elizabeth Fentress

Response: Cultural Layering and Performative Ethnicity

8. Peter van Dommelen

Response: Local Representations

Capitolia, temples to the triad of divinities Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, Iuno Regina and Minerva Augusta, are often considered part of the standard urban ‘kit’ of Roman colonies. Their placement at one end of the forum is sometimes seen as schematizing and replicating in miniature the relationship between the Capitolium at Rome and the Forum Romanum below it. Reliably attested Capitolia are, however, rarer in the provinces than this widespread view assumes and there seems to be no relationship between civic status and the erection of a Capitolium. Indeed, outside Italy there are very few Capitolia other than in the African provinces, where nearly all known examples belong to the second or early third century a.d., mostly in the Antonine period. This regional and chronological clustering demands explanation, and since it comes too late to be associated with the foundation of colonies, and there is no pattern of correlation with upgrades in civic status, we propose that the explanation has to do with the growing power and influence of North African élites, who introduced the phenomenon from Rome. Rather than being a form of temple imposed from the centre on the provinces, Capitolia were adopted by provincial élites on the basis of their relationship with Rome.

Two articles in recent issues of Antiquity have taken opposing views of the infant burials in the ‘Tophet’, the precinct at Carthage, sacred to the goddess Tanit, that contained funerary urns of thousands of cremated infants. The first (Smith et al. 2011) held that these must be evidence of the infant sacrifice that was so loudly condemned by Greek and Roman writers, since the infants were not perinatal, although most were under two months old at the time of death. In a rejoinder, Schwartz et al. (2012) argued that the Carthage Tophet was the place of burial for the very young regardless of the cause of death. They estimated age at death between prenatal and six months, consistent with the recorded incidence of perinatal mortality in certain societies in recent periods. Here we close the debate with two related papers. In the first of these, Patricia Smith and her co-authors return to argue that infant sacrifice is still (in their view) the most likely interpretation of the data, based on the age distribution of the deceased. In the second, Paolo Xella and colleagues, too, are convinced that infant sacrifice took place. They step aside from the details of the cremated remains, however, to emphasise a range of other social and archaeological aspects of the Tophets in Carthage and elsewhere that are critical for understanding these sanctuaries and their rituals.