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What did it mean to be Roman once the Roman Empire had collapsed in the West? Staying Roman examines Roman identities in the region of modern Tunisia and Algeria between the fifth-century Vandal conquest and the seventh-century Islamic invasions. Using historical, archaeological and epigraphic evidence, this study argues that the fracturing of the empire's political unity also led to a fracturing of Roman identity along political, cultural and religious lines, as individuals who continued to feel 'Roman' but who were no longer living under imperial rule sought to redefine what it was that connected them to their fellow Romans elsewhere. The resulting definitions of Romanness could overlap, but were not always mutually reinforcing. Significantly, in late antiquity Romanness had a practical value, and could be used in remarkably flexible ways to foster a sense of similarity or difference over space, time and ethnicity, in a wide variety of circumstances.

Explore a one-of-a-kind and authoritative resource on Ancient North Africa A Companion to North Africa in Antiquity, edited by a recognized leader in the field, is the first reference work of its kind in English. It provides a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of North Africa's rich history from the Protohistoric period through Late Antiquity (1000 BCE to the 800 CE). Comprised of twenty-four thematic and topical essays by established and emerging scholars covering the area between ancient Tripolitania and the Atlantic Ocean, including the Sahara, the volume introduces readers to Ancient North Africa's environment, peoples, institutions, literature, art, economy and more, taking into account the significant body of new research and fieldwork that has been produced over the last fifty years. A Companion to North Africa in Antiquity is an essential resource for anyone interested in this important region of the Ancient World.

Drawing upon scholarship of cultural identity, anthropology and historical linguistics, this book offers a novel and contextual approach to the interpretation of archaeological evidence for Jewish populations in North Africa and elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean.

Aïn Wassel is the only rural site of Africa Proconsularis which has been excavated using the stratigraphic method and the detailed results are published in this volume thanks to an archaeological field survey of the surrounding rural region.

In this book Sadi Maréchal examines the survival, transformation and eventual decline of Roman public baths and bathing habits in Italy, North Africa and Palestine during Late Antiquity. Through the analysis of archaeological remains, ancient literature, inscriptions and papyri, the continued importance of bathhouses as social hubs within the urban fabric is demonstrated, thus radically altering common misconceptions of their decline through the rise of Christianity and elite seclusion. Persistent ideas about health and hygiene, as well as perpetuating ideas of civic self-esteem, drove people to build, restore and praise these focal points of daily life when other classical buildings were left to crumble.

Across his corpus, Augustine strikingly and recurrently deploys the three cognate metaphors of slavery to sin, redemption from sin, and slavery to God. I argue that Augustine’s use of these theological metaphors is thoroughly contoured by the legal and social strictures governing slavery and freedom in the later Roman empire. To develop this argument, I pay close attention to the economic and legal connotations of some key terms in Augustine’s lexicon of salvation—like manumissio, redemptio, and libertas—and seek to tease out the social, legal, and economic logic they encapsulate. As I show, the concept of dominium underwrites Augustine’s description of the prelapsarian ordo naturalis as a chain of hierarchical relationships: between God and man, soul and body, male and female. The notion that human beings are enslaved to sin, subject to the condicio servitutis from birth, evokes the situation of laboring tenants (coloni) bound to the land through their origo. Moreover, the bishop of Hippo’s descriptions of captivity to the devil and liberation through the interpellation (interpellatio) of God the Redeemer are informed by the contemporary reality of barbarian captivity and liberales causae, so richly described in Augustine’s Letter 10*. Finally, Augustine’s characterization of Christian service in terms of a state of simultaneous freedom and servitude implicitly draws upon the legal norms governing the relationship of freed captives to their redeemers, as well as the obligations of obsequium and gratia which freedmen owed to their former masters.

Aïn Wassel is the only rural site of Africa Proconsularis which has been excavated using the stratigraphic method and the detailed results are published in this volume thanks to an archaeological field survey of the surrounding rural region. The interpretation of the stratigraphic sequence of the excavated area was able to determine a precise chrono-typology of pottery and amphoras, and to outline the importance of the Vandal and Byzantine period, which was confirmed by additional data from the survey. The excavation provided evidence of sustainable intensive mixed farming: an oil mill and press, a grain hand mill, a sundial, bones of cattle and dromedaries raised for labour, transport, milk, meat, skins, wool. Remains of fowl, such as a partridge and fragments of ash tree, pine and olive stones were found and analyzed. Local imitations of African Red Slip (ARS) wares were identified for the first time, and three new types of amphoras of large dimensions were discovered and classified as Aïn Wassel 1, 2 and 3. The excavation proved that in the 7th c. AD north Africa was still very active and dynamic, where regional trade used both fluvial and ground transportation. Until recently, this was considered a period of crisis, abandonment of the countryside and ruralization of cities; it was not so.

The seismicity of Algeria since the nineteenth century is relatively well documented. However, compared with the numerous damaging earthquakes that are documented since 1850, fewer than a dozen reports of earthquakes are listed for the pre-1850 ad period, suggesting that the historical record is missing a substantial number of earthquakes. This paper examines the use of literary and epigraphic sources relevant to the investigation of seismicity in Algeria during Roman times. We provide examples where the meager written literary record may be supplemented with appropriate archaeological and epigraphic data describing damage to ancient Roman sites. The examples show that collaboration between earth scientists and archeologists is of utility in improving the seismic record and highlights the need for further study of data sources and repositories located both inside and outside of Algeria.

This volume contains twelve contributions on the urban development of the Near East and North Africa in Late Antiquity. On the one hand the authors consider historical and cultural aspects of the region. A comprehensive section of illustrations of new archaeological material and its interpretation then form the second focus of this volume of papers.