Should we speak of “Roman Africa,” or of “Africa in the Roman Empire?” By posing this question, David J. Mattingly, in Between Sahara and Sea: Africa in the Roman Empire, invites readers to reconsider Africa’s place within Roman imperial history.
David J. Mattingly is an expert archaeologist and historian of the Roman world. His career is defined by a critical approach to Roman imperialism. Coming from a family deeply engaged in classical studies, his early exposure to ancient history and material culture defined a career that has made him one of the most influential scholars of North Africa and of Roman Africa. His book challenges the Roman-centered narratives and highlights indigenous societies and their agency.
The book argues that the term “Roman Africa” is problematic as it often represents the African part of the Roman Empire as passive recipients of Roman culture and civilization. Between Sahara and Sea challenges this traditional view which focuses heavily on provincial elites and urban monuments. Instead, Mattingly shows that the experience of the individuals within the African provinces varies from one community to the other. To expose these nuances, the scholar focuses on the military, urban, and rural communities. A central pillar of Mattingly’s argument is the concept of discrepant identities. Instead of a uniform process of Romanization, he demonstrates through extensive archaeological landscape surveys that the experience of the North African provinces is radically different for a soldier, an urban elite, and a rural peasant.
A significant contribution of Between Sahara and Sea is Mattingly’s insistence on situating Roman intervention within the broader chronological framework of what he considers the North African Iron Age. By dedicating a substantial portion of the book to the period between 1000 bce and 40 ce and beyond, the scholar effectively dismantles the Eurocentric idea that North Africa was a void of civilization waiting for Roman Enlightenment. Mattingly illustrates that, since the first millennium, the region had already faced a civilization clash with the Phoenicians, and the Greeks. Both these outside civilizations contributed to their extent in the shaping of the region. In addition, North Africa was home to sophisticated Numidian, Mauretanian, and Gaetulian kingdoms characterized by funerary monuments, complex military organization and settlements, advanced agricultural systems, and strong political structures. This historical depth is crucial to his argument for indigenous agency as it demonstrates that the African populations did not merely adopt Roman culture out of a lack of their own. They were rather engaged in a deliberate process of selection, adaptation, and resistance based on a millennium of established societal norms.
Furthermore, the geographical scope of the book extends southward into the central Sahara through the Garamantes, a group of people who lived in the zone before the first millennium—that is, before outsiders’ conquest of North Africa. Mattingly uses evidence from the Fazzan Project to reveal them as a sophisticated, sedentary civilization. Their mastery of the foggara, which is an underground irrigation system, allowed for the flourishing of a society that thrived independently of Roman political control. Through these people, Mattingly effectively decenters the Mediterranean coast.
Ultimately, Between Sahara and Sea serves as a powerful deconstruction of the colonial myth perpetuated since antiquity that North Africa only became “civilized” through Roman intervention. During the Modern Era, colonial powers such as France, Spain, and Great Britain, along with much of their academic establishment, emphasized Rome’s role to set North Africa apart from the rest of the continent and justify the colonization of further territories. By contrast, Mattingly demonstrates that local populations, particularly rural ones, maintained their own cultural and infrastructural practices, proving they were active participants in their own evolution rather than mere subjects of a “civilizing mission.” By adopting this “bottom-up” view, the book reveals a complex landscape of adaptation and resistance that confronts traditional “top-down” imperial narratives. Consequently, this work is much more than a regional history; it is a monumental effort to decolonize the archaeology of North Africa. Mattingly provides the analytical tools for a new generation of scholars, especially those from North Africa and the continent at large, to reclaim their past from the vestiges of Roman, French, Spanish, and British colonial historiography. For any researcher in African studies, this volume is an essential reference, proving that the African experience in the Roman Empire was not one of passive assimilation, but a dynamic saga of endurance, innovation, and distinct identity.
