Chapter 1 introduces the problems to which this book responds and proposes alternative pathways for understanding the archaeology of the Roman Empire. It shows how particular colonial ways-of-knowing continue to shape the stories told of North Africa’s people and their traditions of worship under the Roman Empire, setting these within the binary of “Romanization” or “resistance.” While approaches to the archaeology of other parts of the Roman Empire have begun to embrace New Materialism as a way of moving beyond “Romanization,” this chapter argues that semiotic approaches offer a more productive means of engaging with and explaining the material dimensions of imperial hegemony.

This chapter examines how the episode in Pliny Ep. 6.31.4−6 relates to Roman concepts of gender and warfare. The emperor Trajan judged the case of Gallitta, a military tribune’s wife who had committed adultery with a centurion. Since the reign of Augustus adultery had been criminalized. The Augustan legislation on marriage and adultery has received much scholarly attention, but relatively little has been paid to cases involving military officers. This study argues that the repression of adultery and the control of officers’ wives culturally maintained military discipline, in particular the hierarchy of command. Adultery in this instance subverted military hierarchy; the young officer’s cuckolding of his senior and his failure to display self-control vitiated his fitness for command. The stability of the imperial order depended on the reinforcement of normative gender roles on the frontiers as well as in the city of Rome.

Even if the chaîne opératoire of molk-style rites may have changed little between the eighth century BCE and the second century CE, how worshippers and communities wove significance around these ritualized gestures underwent a marked transformation. Focusing on the tophet of Hadrumetum, this chapter shows how stelae shifted emphasis from the molk as part of an individual, verbal relationship between worshipper and deity to a communal act that foregrounded and elevated a single sacrificant at an altar. Although these scenes of sacrifice-at-altar have been seen as simple calques on the iconography of Roman historical reliefs, worshippers in North Africa instead created new imagery that shared social dynamics and priorities rather than iconographies.

This chapter traces the origin of the Romanization framework: that is, how the discourse on Romanization sprang up and has taken root in early twentieth century scholarship. Professionalization of the discipline mixed with the deep-rooted gentlemanly tradition stirred new dynamics. Views on Roman imperialism ranged from those of British imperial civil servants to those of American professional academics; approaches varied from the old gentlemanly tradition of exemplary history to new professional academics’ critical history; and evaluations diverged from admiration to disapproval. Despite wide-ranging differences, none escaped from their own social, economic, and political surroundings shaped by European and American imperialism. The comparisons between the ancient Roman Empire and the contemporary British, French, and American empires, either overtly or covertly, underpinned the works of the time.

Where do we go from here? In practical terms with regard to the history of Roman Empire, how can we rewrite it? How do we use postcolonial thought to rewrite the narrative of Roman imperialism and to reframe Romanization? And what value does it hold? Does it matter to the contemporary audience? Can it make intellectual and moral interventions, and if so, what kinds of intervention? To make historical interventions on Romanization, to write a projective past of Roman imperialism, and to narrate repressed histories of the colonized and migrants can interrupt the present and negotiate a different future. Historical intervention on Roman imperialism, I believe, can revise the current sense of ownership of classical antiquity and can provide a better and wider structural lens on how on how to link the ancient past with the present.

Does postcolonial studies present a theoretical framework appropriate to Romanization studies? Does Romanization studies have evidence appropriate for postcolonial theories? Even though postcolonial theories did not stem from ancient Roman imperialism per se, they provide a heuristical tool to destabilize the discourse that has sustained imperial systems through history. They help Roman historians and archaeologists to reach a deeper understanding of the dynamic process of imperial discourses and to deconstruct the imperial discourses built through the complex layers of histories. This chapter does not deliver an exhaustive analysis or a landscape overview of postcolonial studies according to a certain order of significance or thematic categorization as is the common practice in the discipline, for example, along the triad of Said-Bhabha-Spivak or along the axis of theoretical and materialist approaches. Instead, here I explore postcolonial ideas which have influenced and reoriented Romanization studies.