Religion and the making of Roman Africa: votive stelae, traditions, and empire
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 &#...
| Summary: | 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. "The first English-language account of religious change in Roman North Africa, challenging 150 years of colonial scholarship and offering new paths forward for studying and decolonizing the archaeology and history of Roman provinces"-- Provided by publisher |
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| Item Description: | Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 22 Oct 2024). - Revision of the author's thesis (PhD, University of Oxford, 2010) under the title: Votive stelae, religion and cultural change in Africa Proconsularis and Numidia 200 BC-AD 300 |
| Physical Description: | 1 Online-Ressource (xix, 460 Seiten) |
| ISBN: | 978-1-139-09679-9 |
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/9781139096799 |
