The title of this remarkable book may, in some respects, misrepresent the nature of its inquiry. It is not, in the strictest sense, an examination of how religion contributed to the making of Roman Africa. Rather, it offers a sweeping and deeply textured account of how the Roman Empire appropriated, reconfigured, and gradually transformed a preexisting cult (and perhaps local chthonic cults), centered originally on Saturn and deeply rooted in the African provinces, across centuries of imperial rule. What emerges is not a story of religion as a backdrop to empire, but of religion as a medium through which imperial power inscribed itself onto local landscapes and sensibilities. Or as the author eloquently puts it: “the Roman Empire left no relationship – among persons, material signifiers, and interpretants – untouched. Even a form of practice like stele-erection, or gods and iconographies that seem regionally distinct and continuous from the Iron Age through the Late Empire, became entangled with, reproduced, and naturalized those forms of relationship that constituted imperial hegemony” (23).Footnote ¹

In Part I of the book (divided into two chapters) entitled “Colonial histories,” McCarty investigates the impact of colonialism on the historiography of the Saturn cult. In many respects, he echoes the (uncited) perspective of Février,Footnote ² who conceived of religion in Roman Africa not as a static reflection of belief, but as a contested and adaptive field, one in which imperial domination, local negotiation, and cultural integration were continually enacted. Far from being inert expressions of faith, religious institutions and practices functioned as critical instruments in the architecture of Roman power, legitimizing rule while mediating the complexities of provincial life.

However, as McCarty astutely cautions, any attempt to uncover, much less fully grasp, the contours of Roman imperial hegemony in North Africa must begin with the critical unlearning of what he terms “essentializing idealism rooted in colonial archaeologies, overarching metanarratives, and the privileging of specific semiotic conventions” (23). His intervention gestures toward what Frantz Fanon more searingly described as the pervasive, ambient effects of colonialism on the mental, emotional, and spatial environment of the colonized.Footnote ³

Few examples more vividly illustrate the distorting effects of French “atmospheric colonization” on interpretations of Roman Africa than Le Glay’s influential studies.Footnote ⁴ As McCarty’s analysis makes clear, the history of the Saturn cult is itself deeply entangled in the processes of Roman “atmospheric colonization,” mirroring in antiquity in many respects the very dynamics later reinscribed by colonial scholarship.Footnote ⁵

But before engaging McCarty’s important intervention, it is instructive to reflect, albeit briefly, on the environment that enabled Le Glay to write Saturne africain, a work shaped as much by the epistemologies of its moment as by the materials it sought to interpret, and one that for decades stood, for Africanists like myself, as both a product and a pillar of its disciplinary tradition.

Le Glay’s distinguished record as a scholar of Roman religion and epigraphy, particularly in North Africa, was profoundly affected by France’s colonial and postcolonial entanglements.Footnote ⁶ His career straddled two decisive epochs: the final decade of French Algeria (1949–1962), during which he was deeply embedded in colonial institutions, and the post-independence period, in which his scholarship increasingly reflected the critical re-evaluation of imperial models of history. His writings during this period reveal a subtle but significant evolution in his intellectual and political orientation.

The three volumes of the Saturne africain inevitably saw some evolution of his perspective on the material. Composed in the immediate aftermath of the Algerian War of Independence, and within a French intellectual tradition deeply invested in the essentialist logic of the nation-state, itself a legacy of the Revolution, Le Glay’s reading of the Saturn cult as an expression of an immutable African character was symptomatic of its historical moment.

Yet, following Algerian independence, Le Glay’s work shows a clear shift away from Roman-centered narratives toward a more nuanced appreciation of provincial agency and cultural negotiation. In his later work, however, and especially La religion romaine,Footnote ⁷ Le Glay adopted a vocabulary of hybridity and negotiation. Roman religious practices are no longer presented as imposed or passively adopted but as reshaped, translated, and hybridized within local frameworks, a perspective not far from McCarty’s, as we shall see. Indeed, Le Glay’s evolution mirrors the broader transformation of French intellectual life during and after the collapse of the empire. He evolved from a scholar structurally embedded in colonial institutions and assumptions to one who, over time, challenged their historiographical underpinnings.

Le Glay’s later thinking would thus have brought him closer to the new perspective advanced by McCarty, which argues against a monolithic and unchanging “religion of African Saturn,” in favor of a cult whose practices created and continually reconfigured connections between worshippers and deities, between individuals and both their immediate and their imagined communities, and between humans and material objects. Rather than representing resistance to empire or the survival of a static Berber tradition, McCarty contends that the many changes and manifestations of the Saturn cult actively participated in, and helped to construct and legitimize, a hierarchical and centralizing imperial order (23–24).

This book therefore represents a decisive theoretical intervention in the study of religion and identity in Roman North Africa that challenges essentialist frameworks.Footnote ⁸ Rather than treating “Libyan,” “Phoenician,” or “Roman” identities as fixed or timeless, McCarty insists on their situational and performative nature. Religion, in turn, is reframed not as an abstract system of belief but as a practice embedded in materiality and social life. Indeed, it is hardly surprising in this regard that McCarty’s critique of Romanization is particularly pointed in exposing it as a teleological construct that masks asymmetrical imperial power relations. He proposes as an alternative a theoretically sophisticated approach that integrates the material turn with pragmatic semiotics. Drawing on the semiotic work of C. S. Peirce (21),Footnote ⁹ he emphasizes how ritual objects such as stelae do not merely signify but actively do social and political work, shaping communities, mediating divine presence, and sustaining imperial structures. Central to McCarty’s thesis is the redefinition of the stele and associated cult, not as passive markers of religious belief, but as semiotic agents implicated in the construction of communal identity and imperial hegemony in Roman Africa.

The second chapter, “Historicizing stelae and sanctuaries,” moves from historiography to archaeology, reinterpreting the material record of votive stelae and tophet-like sanctuaries across the western Mediterranean. Rejecting notions of an unchanging “Punic religiosity,” McCarty reconstructs the historical evolution of ritual practice. He identifies four main phases: the Phoenician diaspora (8th–6th c. BCE), the Carthaginian expansion (5th–3rd c. BCE), the tophet boom of the long 1st c. BCE, and the Roman Imperial period. Each stage represents a transformation of ritual economies and symbolic language. Stelae become instruments for the negotiation of social identity and civic belonging. In decentering Carthage, McCarty shows that these sanctuaries were not vestiges of Punic religion but dynamic arenas of local adaptation within shifting political orders (41–78).

He also revisits, in the first of a series of interventions on the subject, the long-debated topic of child sacrifice.Footnote ¹⁰ While affirming the archaeological association between stelae and the cremated remains of perinatal individuals, McCarty problematizes the categories of “child” and “sacrifice” as culturally specific and historically contingent (29–33). He stresses that the biological presence of infants in urns does not necessarily map onto ancient concepts of personhood. McCarty explores how ancient actors constructed meaning around death, offering, and identity, noting the absence of female dedicants and the ritual authority typically ascribed to male agents. His initial conclusion, to be revisited in chapters 5–7: “For now, suffice to say that many stelae, from the eighth century BCE until at least the second century CE, were erected in relation to molk-style rites, where offrands burned and buried offerings that could include biological infants. The relationships among offerer, offering, and monument were not, however, stable through time” (33).

McCarty further contends that the widespread appearance of tophet-like sanctuaries that swept across North Africa between the late 2nd c. BCE and the early 2nd c. CE was not a direct product of Carthaginian religious imperialism, nor a simple consequence of diasporic replication after the city’s fall in 146 BCE. He instead situates these sanctuaries within newly emergent socio-political and economic regimes, particularly among interior communities negotiating their place between Roman and Numidian hegemony (69–72). In doing so, McCarty rejects diffusionism in favor of local agency, through which the boom in votive stelae and molk-style rites belong to a part of a broader pattern of elite self-fashioning, urbanization, and resource mobilization.

Yet, if the argument is that these communities created new material histories through stele-dedication, it is important not to lose sight of the deeper genealogy of the rite itself. The evidence, as McCarty himself acknowledges, is not one of rupture but of selective retention and ritual translation. The discontinuities are striking: the near disappearance of Tanit, the use of neo-Punic and Latin inscriptions rather than Punic, the rise of communal dedications by the baali of local towns, and the diverse contents of urns, including animal bones, pathological perinates, and birds. But the form of the rite, the stele, the urn, the burning and burial of offerings, remains recognizably Punic. The sanctuary at Henchir el-Hami, for example, exhibits the same fundamental grammar of sacrifice as Carthage’s tophet, albeit deployed in a different social idiom. Rather than treat this as evidence of transmission or cultural survival, a more fruitful model may be ritual translation: the appropriation and reconfiguration of an inherited ritual mode within new political, material, and social conditions. Carthage, I would contend, provided a reservoir of ritual signs and practices, some of them portable, others embedded in the symbolic economy of elites, which could be reinterpreted and localized. Such reinterpretation did not require direct migration or institutional continuity, as ritual memory can persist in diffuse ways, through oral transmission, artisanal traditions, or elite emulation, even in the absence of formal cultic lineages. It is significant, for instance, that the dedicatory language on neo-Punic stelae continues to reference Baal Hammon, even as Tanit disappears almost entirely from the corpus. This suggests a curated memory of Carthaginian cult, in which some elements were preserved and others discarded or forgotten. Similarly, the use of neo-Punic itself, rather than Punic or Libyan exclusively, signals a temporal and cultural distance from the mother city, but also a continuity of linguistic and epigraphic form.

McCarty’s insistence on situating these rites within a matrix of urban growth, elite competition, and artisanal economies is nonetheless, valuable. The correlation between the rise of baali-led civic dedications, the spread of monumental tombs, and the adoption of molk-style sanctuaries suggests that religious practice was deeply embedded in local strategies of prestige. These strategies did not emerge in a vacuum, but as a reimagining of a Punic ritual repertoire under new historical conditions.

Nor did the rites spread because they were transmitted wholesale from Carthage; they emerged because they provided a flexible symbolic toolkit, legible across linguistic, ethnic, and political boundaries, and capable of being tailored to the aspirations of new urban elites such as the baali. In essence what we are witnessing, I suggest, is a ritual form remembered, a landscape transformed, and a class of elites seeking to inscribe themselves visibly within an ascendant Roman hegemony, alongside the Numidian kingdom, which required new expressions of identity, loyalty, and differentiation. These included, among other things, the modest adoption of Latin epigraphy, perhaps indirectly the emerging monumentalization of urban centers, and the rise of dedicatory practices at sanctuaries, which might all be read as ways of both responding to and coexisting within the expanding framework of Africa within the Roman Empire.

That said, the case of Carthage complicates slightly McCarty’s emphasis on transformation and re-signification. Whereas sanctuaries at sites such as Thugga, Maktar, or Cirta show clear continuities, that is, Punic stele traditions translated into Saturnine dedications, or molk rites refashioned within Roman imperial cult, the Carthage tophet was precociously terminated. The subsequent construction of the great Temple of Caelestis on the site represents not continuity but outright suppression, a deliberate erasure of Punic ritual at the very heart of Africa Proconsularis.Footnote ¹¹ This divergence is telling. Carthage’s symbolic weight as Rome’s former enemy, its central position in the urban landscape, and the stigmatizing memory of Carthaginian “child sacrifice” all militated against the kinds of adaptive processes visible elsewhere. In the end, Carthage emerges as something of an exception that proves McCarty’s rule: the stele tradition was never timeless but always contingent, vulnerable to obliteration when political and cultural pressures demanded suppression rather than translation.

Part II, “Themes in the making of hegemony,” comprising the remainder of the book, explores the issues raised in Part I in greater depth. The third chapter, “Making Africa with Punic signs,” develops one of the book’s most ambitious and provocative arguments. Here McCarty argues that “Africa” in the long 1st c. BCE was not a cultural essence awaiting discovery, nor the survival of a Carthaginian identity after 146 BCE, but a new construct assembled by civic elites, the baali, from a repertoire of visual and verbal signifiers, especially those associated with molk-style rites, into a trans-regional but flexible symbolic system. McCarty’s argument is explicitly semiotic. Drawing on the works of C. S. Peirce, H. K. Bhabha, and J. and J. L. Comaroff,Footnote ¹² the author treats signs not as static carriers of meaning but as historically contingent, relational elements embedded in power struggles. In transitional periods, signs can be broken down and reconfigured into new hegemonies. The long 1st c. BCE, bracketed by the fall of Carthage, the fragmentation of Numidian power, and the advance of Roman rule, represents one such period.

McCarty’s argument is developed through what he terms a “package of signifiers” (92). These include the familiar “sign of Tanit” and crescent-and-disc motifs on stelae, the persistence of neo-Punic script in epigraphy, and the adoption of the Carthaginian-derived civic title špt (sufete). These elements were not simply borrowed from Rome, nor directly inherited from living Carthaginian institutions, but quarried, again as I suggested above, from the memory of Carthage and redeployed in a “Third Space” between Roman and Numidian forms.

McCarty’s treatment of the “sign of Tanit” (92–101) is especially compelling. Before 146 BCE, it dominated Carthaginian tophet stelae as a liminal, protective emblem; after Carthage’s fall, it proliferated across new sanctuaries, often anthropomorphized or re-styled as an altar. The emphasis falls less on what the symbol “meant” than on its capacity for recognizability and variation. The crescent-and-disc motif, similarly, underwent a striking reorientation, with upturned crescents overwhelmingly replacing the downturned Carthaginian form. Such deliberate mutation exemplifies McCarty’s point that signs in this period operated less as fixed icons than as indices of continuity and difference simultaneously.

McCarty’s recognition of the migration of these signs beyond sanctuary contexts is another strength of his analysis. At Tipasa, for instance, a tomb of ca. 75 CE contained both a gold earring in the shape of the “sign of Tanit” and a giant version of the sign assembled on the floor out of grave goods. Here the repertoire entered funerary practice, embedding the deceased within a trans-regional semiotic tradition while at the same time asserting local individuality (98–100).

Epigraphy is treated in parallel (98–103). Neo-Punic script, despite competition from Libyan, Greek, and Latin, dominated votive dedications from Mauretania to Tripolitania. Its persistence and local variability are interpreted not as conservatism but as evidence of decentralized adaptation: elites chose to inscribe in neo-Punic because of the prestige and recognizability of the script within the same sign-system.

Particularly innovative is McCarty’s discussion of the sufetes (101–8). Rather than viewing them as straightforward relicts of Carthaginian government, he suggests they were used more as symbols – titles that communities could adopt or adapt to express identity and authority. Their appearance in at least 40 communities, many never under Carthaginian control, is explained as an act of symbolic appropriation rather than institutional continuity. Case studies from Thugga, Cirta, and Volubilis demonstrate how the title could be deployed in very different local contexts – funerary, numismatic, diplomatic – yet always within the broader repertoire of Punic signs. Particularly illuminating is the linkage of sufetes to the tabulae patronatus of 26–27 CE, in which African communities engaged Roman officers through contracts mediated by this Carthaginian-derived title.

The comparative coda, juxtaposing the sufetes with the Gallic vergobret, extends the argument beyond Africa. Both offices, McCarty suggests, flourished in the same transitional century, serving as adaptive mediators between local political traditions and Roman provincial structures. Rome did not efface these magistracies; it reframed them in recognizably Roman idioms while leaving their indigenous prestige intact. This comparative gesture successfully situates Africa within wider debates on the persistence and transformation of local offices under empire. Africa in the 1st c. BCE thus emerges as neither Romanizing nor timelessly Punic, but as a place in which elites refashioned inherited symbols to articulate authority and legitimacy in a landscape of shifting hegemonies.

The comparative analysis of the baali and Gallic vergobrets deserves further exploration. McCarty’s brief comparison gestures toward the idea of parallel processes of adaptation in Africa and Gaul, but the similarities may be more than formal. Both offices functioned as mediating institutions linking indigenous authority to Roman administration. A more sustained treatment could have deepened the discussion of how local elites across the empire used inherited titles to negotiate their place within imperial structures of power. A further dimension of this comparison emerges when viewed through the framework of Roman civic integration processes that advanced local elites toward citizenship through the performance of magistracies within dependent communities. In Gaul, this process shaped the evolution of the vergobret, whose office mediated between indigenous authority and the emerging structures of municipal governance under Latium minus. A comparable logic can be discerned in Africa, where the baali occupied an intermediate civic and religious position within towns of incomplete juridical status, communities that, like the oppida attribués of Nîmes, remained attached to colonial centers such as Carthage or Theveste. The exercise of office itself constituted a semiotic act of belonging: to dedicate, to govern, and to inscribe one’s name in stone was to participate in the slow translation of local power into the language of Roman legality. The baali, no less than the vergobrets, represent the intersection of semiotics and law, embodying the ritualized process through which empire transformed local elites into representatives of its civic order.

Chapter 4, “Making a god,” addresses the relationship between Baal Hammon and Saturn. McCarty contends that representations of these deities should not be understood as evidence of a timeless, essential divine personality carried forward across cultural and political shifts, but rather as contingent products of semiotic practices. In this framing, gods were not pre-existing, ontologically distinct beings who persisted unchanged through time, but were instead made and remade through the signs, images, and attributes by which worshippers invoked them. McCarty therefore seeks to dismantle what he sees as colonial myths (115) of continuity and equivalence, in particular, the long-standing assumption that Baal Hammon simply “became” Saturn, and that this process of identification guaranteed cultural permanence for African communities under Roman rule.

McCarty builds his argument on three levels. First, in theoretical terms, he insists that gods were constituted through signifiers and that these signifiers not only shaped divine–human relations but also structured relations among humans themselves. Second, on the conceptual front, he maintains that the relationship between Baal Hammon and Saturn was more complex than a straightforward translation or equivalence of a core divine self. Instead, these deities emerged as fluid constellations of signs whose meanings changed through time and space. Third, in historical terms, McCarty identifies a marked semiotic transformation between the late Punic and Imperial periods: Carthaginian stelae, which had signified divine presence through abstract and indexical imagery, gave way in the Roman period to iconic anthropomorphic images of Saturn, a shift that the author links to Roman infrastructures of power, including roads, the army, and elite benefaction. In essence, McCarty moves beyond essentialist or syncretic models of divine identity and aligns the study of gods with constructivist approaches that have already transformed the study of human identities in Roman Africa. Particularly valuable is his distinction between the indexical practices of Punic stelae at Carthage and the iconic imagery of Saturn in the Imperial period, which demonstrates how divine presence was signified differently in different historical contexts. He also provides an important catalogue of Saturnic representations, ranging from busts and enthroned figures to depictions of the god with a falx, which allows for a more nuanced appreciation of the diversity of Saturn cults across Africa. Moreover, the contextualization of these iconographic changes within imperial structures, including the role of road networks in disseminating images and the patronage of local benefactors in shaping cult, is a valuable reminder of the entanglement between religion and the socio-political fabric of Africa under the Roman Empire.

At several points, McCarty makes some rather sweeping claims, such as the assertion that divine semiotics “transformed the social world” of North Africa. This is difficult to sustain on the available evidence. A more modest formulation would be that changes in divine representation participated in, and perhaps reinforced, broader social transformations rather than driving them. I think. He is likewise perhaps too categorical in claiming that “Baal Hammon did not become Saturn.” For example, the discussion of the Sabratha ablution basin (122–23) arguably presses too hard against the possibility of sign-sweeping or continuity between Baal Hammon and Saturn. McCarty’s insistence that the bilingual inscriptions represent two distinct semiotic frames, each legible only within its own linguistic system, rests on a tenuous material observation: that a viewer could read only one inscription at a time. Yet the very act of engraving both texts on a single cult object, and of replicating nearly identical dedicatory formulas, speaks not to disjunction but to convergence. The basin embodies, rather than denies, the bilingual and bicultural reality that votive practice could sustain multiple names for a single divine referent. The argument that the object enforces “choice” seems to overlook the integrative impulse of such dedications, in which language, material, and ritual function jointly affirm continuity. If anything, the Sabratha basin exemplifies the persistence of transferable signifiers – vessels, stelae, and dedicatory media – that carried forward the semantic and cultic identity of Baal Hammon–Saturn across the imperial Maghreb.

Indeed, while it is important to highlight change and reconstitution, there is a diachronic relationship between the deities that cannot be ignored. Even if worshippers did not consciously conceptualize a translation, the avoidance of the Punic name in the Imperial period and the corresponding rise of Saturn suggest a process of substitution. Indeed, the very evidence adduced in the chapter, such as the dedications from Calama and Thugga that shift from Punic to Latin, points to continuity within transformation. To deny this connection risks losing sight of the very historical processes the chapter seeks to analyze.

At the same time, McCarty convincingly shows that through the regional variation in Saturn’s attributes, from pruning hooks in the grain belt of central Tunisia to pike-poles in the forested Aurès, the god was locally remade to suit the productive regimes of worshippers (129–31). This, however, makes it difficult to sustain the larger claim, advanced in later chapters, that divine semiotics became increasingly centralized and hierarchical under the empire. If anything, the evidence suggests that Saturn in Africa remained a dispersed and locally adapted deity, whose cult was flexible enough to take on different functions in different communities.

In sum, while McCarty’s critique of colonial scholarship on Baal Hammon as a “supreme Semitic god” is well taken, the rejection of this framework does not necessarily invalidate the recognition, already present in antiquity, that Baal Hammon and Saturn were linked. The fact that 19th-c. scholarship mischaracterized Baal Hammon does not mean that the entire equation between Baal Hammon and Saturn is wrong. On the contrary, the evidence may be better explained by seeing Baal Hammon as evolving into Saturn through a gradual and uneven process of rearticulation.

Chapter 5, “Making sanctuary communities,” shifts attention from the making of gods to the making of worshippers, asking how individuals positioned themselves within sanctuary communities through the erection of stelae. McCarty argues that identities grounded in ethnicity or class cannot adequately explain the evidence. Rather, stelae created new forms of community, in which dedicants competed for prestige, authority, and visibility, whereas sanctuaries became arenas of individuation and hierarchization, reflecting the broader inequalities of empire in locally inflected ways. McCarty contrasts early Carthaginian stelae of the 3rd and 2nd c. BCE with Imperial-period monuments. At Carthage, schematic symbols and brief dedications emphasized divine presence rather than the individual identity of the dedicant. By the 2nd c. CE, however, the focus had shifted decisively toward human subjects: stelae from Thamugadi and elsewhere depict togate figures, pendants, and sacrificial implements, with the god often reduced to a marginal bust. This transformation signals a reorientation of the stele’s function, from mediating divine presence to commemorating the human participant.

A key contribution is McCarty’s close enquiry into the identity of worshippers and whether their identities changed over time. This is a notable challenge to the colonial-era trope of African peasants as the primary dedicants. Onomastic analysis shows that more than 90 percent of Latin inscribed stelae were set up by Roman citizens. These dedicants identified themselves with the conventions of citizenship, through the tria nomina or later nomen and cognomen, and frequently portrayed themselves in togate dress, the visual marker of civic status. This percentage of citizens far exceeds estimates for the provincial population at large, making clear that Saturn worshippers were not marginal outsiders but an enfranchised and privileged group (180–90).

Nevertheless, several aspects of the argument invite caution. Ethnicity and class are perhaps dismissed too categorically. While it is true that colonial scholarship overemphasized them, these dimensions nonetheless shaped experience and self-representation, even if refracted through Roman idioms of citizenship and prestige. Treating them as wholly insufficient risks flattening the complexity of identity in African sanctuary communities. The claim that stelae transformed the social world of North Africa also seems overstated. They certainly participated in the reproduction of inequalities, but the evidence does not show that they fundamentally reshaped society as a whole. A more measured conclusion is that sanctuaries served as microcosms in which imperial hierarchies were displayed, contested, and sometimes localized in familial terms. Finally, while the reinterpretation of sacerdos as a title of prestige is compelling, more could be said about how this role intersected with civic offices or local authority, since the title’s value derived from its display rather than from a standardized institutional function.

McCarty also contends (190–238) that sanctuary communities evolved from relatively horizontal networks of co-dedicants into hierarchical zones of prestige competition. At Carthage, stelae fostered egalitarian communities of shared ritual practice. In the Imperial period, however, dedicants sought to distinguish themselves through wealth, monumental scale, and titles. The office of sacerdos, often misread as evidence of an exotic Oriental priesthood, emerges instead as a locally variable marker of prestige. Its privileges and connotations differed from site to site, but in every case it functioned to elevate certain individuals above their peers. The strength of the chapter lies in its demolition of simplistic ethnic and class explanations. It shows convincingly that worshippers mobilized cosmopolitan signifiers, Roman names, togas, and titles, within the context of local sanctuary practices, reproducing the hierarchies of empire at a micro level.

Chapter 6, “Making children subjects of empire,” investigates the emergence of children as central figures on stelae dedicated in sanctuaries of Saturn. The chapter frames this as part of a broader process by which personhood and subjecthood were defined within the imperial order. The case study of Mascula, where the stelae of the Flavii brothers oscillate between funerary commemoration and votive dedication, sets the stage for a discussion of how children’s images blurred boundaries between offerings, dedicants, and commemorated persons (229–33). This duality raises a key point: children are not only represented but represented as subjects whose futures were imagined in terms structured by empire.

McCarty then turns to the material from Thamugadi (233–47), where numerous stelae depict children with attributes widely recognizable across the empire: bullae, lunulae, small animals, even scrolls. These iconographic markers both individualize and categorize, presenting children as identifiable social persons. Yet the repertoire was not merely imported wholesale. Rather, it was selectively adapted and localized. Girls, for example, are often shown with birds, and while lunulae are rare elsewhere, they are frequent in Africa. Such adaptations confirm that these were not simple Romanizing veneers but glocalized deployments of a shared image-world.

The crux of the chapter, and one of its most challenging arguments, is that the children on these stelae were not the dedicants but more likely the offerings themselves (247–60). This interpretation destabilizes the usual assumption that the central figure on a stele is always the commissioner or patron. At some sites, including Calama and Thamugadi, iconographic details such as grapes, birds, and rams reinforce this reading. Grapes appear as clear symbols of sacrificial offering, and excavated urns at Thamugadi even contained bird bones, further entangling the animal and child imagery with local molk-style rites. Children here are defined through the potential of being offerings, and yet they are monumentalized as social persons.

This is where the imperial dimension becomes decisive (260–68). In contrast to earlier Punic representation, most notably the depersonalized infants of Carthaginian tophet stelae, the African stelae of the High Empire figure children with markers of status and citizenship. The bulla, for instance, associates boys with the protective amulet of the Roman citizen child, while the toga or scroll links them to civic education and juridical adulthood. Thus, the stelae do more than record sacrificial rites. They mobilize the rite and monument to order society itself, presenting children as subjects whose imagined futures were bound up with the structures of empire.

McCarty is cautious in drawing conclusions about the persistence of literal child sacrifice. Biological infants still appear in urns at some sites, though the author stresses that the stelae signal not so much substitution as reconceptualization. What matters is how rites and monuments collaborated to transform the offering of children into the imagining of children as imperial persons. It remains difficult to know how widespread this was, especially in light of Roman official hostility to human sacrifice.Footnote ¹³ Yet the evidence suggests that in Africa, uniquely, this set of practices and representations endured and adapted. In sum, the chapter underscores that the futures envisioned for these children were not abstract. They were juridical, civic, and imperial. Personhood here was inseparable from empire. Of all the possible futures a child might have had, the stelae monumentalize those linked to the status of wealthy Roman citizens, especially in communities shaped by the military presence. In this sense, African stelae perpetuated imperial hegemony through what appeared to be a wholly regional rite.

In Chapter 7, “Making offerings,” McCarty pivots from the semiotics of divine representation to the semiotics of ritual practice. The chapter takes aim at long-standing interpretive habits in Punic and Roman African archaeology, in particular, the assumption of a continuous, unchanging “molk rite” stretching from the Levant to Late Antiquity. McCarty reframes this practice not as a static survival but as a socially negotiated, image-mediated set of performances whose meanings were constantly remade. The move away from the essentialism of “Phoenician religion” or “Carthaginian survival” is one of the most compelling contributions of the book, situating African cult within a framework of communicative practice rather than religious inheritance.

The discussion of images on stelae is central to this reorientation. McCarty insists that the ubiquitous depictions of figures standing at altars (some 500 examples across the African provinces) were neither decorative clichés nor literal reportage of sacrificial acts. Rather, they operated as public semiotic condensations of ritualized relationships: stylized renderings that created rather than merely reflected cult practice. By analyzing how these images naturalized communal modes of offering, McCarty reverses the usual causal order – arguing that representation shaped ritual, not the other way around. The focus on the altar scene as a newly dominant compositional type becomes a vehicle for exploring the broader social transformations of the early Imperial period, when ritual mediation shifted from individual verbal prayer to collective, visible action.

In place of moralizing or evolutionary explanations for the end of infant sacrifice, McCarty situates change within a matrix of semiotic and social feedback. The review of excavated tophet-like sanctuaries, especially the meticulously reconstructed case of Hadrumetum (289–318), demonstrates how changes in imagery and in ritual deposits evolved together. Where older scholarship saw Roman “civilizing” pressure or legal bans on human sacrifice, McCarty sees the gradual internal redefinition of what counted as an effective offering. The Hadrumetum material, with its six stratigraphic phases from the 7th c. BCE to the 2nd c. CE, provides a rare diachronic record of that redefinition. The disappearance of infant remains in the upper layers coincides not with juridical interventions but with a reconceptualization of sacrifice itself, in which the communicative act of dedicating a stele supplanted the older logic of burnt offering.

The chapter’s longue-durée reading of Hadrumetum is both empirically valuable and historiographically self-aware. McCarty patiently unpicks the colonial framing of earlier excavations by P. Cintas and J. Richard, emphasizing evolutionary or moralizing narratives of Punic religion, and demonstrates how their interpretive scaffolding structured even the classification of osteological evidence. His critique of “unified logic” approaches, which efface local variability in favor of an archetypal molk, restores historical agency to the worshippers themselves. This is a subtle but important point: that meaning resided not in the act or the deity alone, but in the communicative process by which sanctuaries and their imagery made sense of action.

Finally, “Making offerings” succeeds in linking micro-analysis of ritual change to the macro-question animating the book: how Roman Africa re-made its religious landscape through new regimes of mediation. The Hadrumetum case study gives material depth to this claim, showing how shifts in offering practice, visual emphasis, and sanctuary organization coalesced into a new ritual economy, one that displaced sacrificial destruction with semiotic display. In this transformation, McCarty locates the roots of later North African religiosity, where stelae, inscriptions, and communal liturgies continued to anchor the social communication of the sacred.

Chapter 8, “Remaking spaces and societies,” explores how the transformation of sanctuary architecture in Roman Africa during the Imperial period recast ritual practices and restructured social and divine relationships. Eschewing typological and culture-historical models, McCarty foregrounds process: the evolution of stele-sanctuaries into monumentalized, spectator-oriented, and spatially bounded sacred environments. This shift was not linear but a complex reconfiguration of ritual space that naturalized imperial authority and elite euergetism while simultaneously inflecting local religious experience.

McCarty’s core contention is that changes in sanctuary architecture, particularly the monumentalization of stele-fields into altar-centered, court-temple complexes, both reflected and drove new forms of ritual, social hierarchy, and engagement with divinity. What had been intimate, individualized, and perhaps even heterogenous ritual experiences in earlier tophet-like stele fields became, over the 2nd and 3rd c. CE, increasingly formalized, communal, and performative. This transformation not only reoriented worshippers’ relationships to the gods but redefined their relationships to one another and to local elites, who increasingly structured and staged these spaces of sacred interaction. McCarty offers a productive critique of culture-historical approaches and evolutionary teleologies, methodically unpacking assumptions that equate formal differences in architecture with fixed ethnic, cultural, or religious identities, in particular, “Semitic” open-air tophets versus “Romano-African” courtyard temples. McCarty critiques interpretations that freight architectural forms with fixed cultural meanings. Instead, he underscores that architectural features should not be read as passive symbols of identity but as active elements shaping ritual practice. The so-called temples à cour were not survivals of indigenous forms but deliberate constructions suited to local liturgical needs within an imperial framework. These spaces were confections, creative syntheses of Roman spatial conventions and regional religious traditions, reflecting the agency of local communities and elites in adapting Roman architectural language to create meaningful and authoritative sacred environments.

All of this is distilled into a series of detailed case-studies which illustrates the diversity of the process (326–83). These include the sites of Henchir el-Hami, Thugga, Thamugadi, Ammaedara, Thurburnica and Henchir Ghayadha, El-Kénissia, Thinissut, and Althiburos, not all of which can be discussed here. At Henchir el-Hami, McCarty shows how the site, divided into an earlier stele field and a later altar-centered complex, reflects a transition from intimate, small-scale rites to more formalized and public sacrificial activities. The reconfiguration of space introduced new ritual hierarchies and orchestrated communal attention. Hundreds of unguentaria, cooking vessels, and dining wares underscore a shift from child sacrifice to communal consumption. The changes established a new spatial and social dynamic, making the altar the focus of ritual activity and the locus for public interaction with the divine.

At Thugga in the late 2nd c. CE, elite funding transformed a tophet-like sanctuary into a grand temple complex centered on public sacrifice and elite commemoration. This new space not only reflected civic ambition but reshaped how worshippers related to each other and the gods. Monumental inscriptions, symbolic footprints, and infrastructural additions like cisterns established new norms of sacred experience. The sanctuary became a stage for civic performance, with elite presence encoded into the architecture and ritual process. The space directed attention toward communal rites and away from the individualized, intimate ritual patterns of earlier periods.

Even within this shared architectural repertoire, sites like Thamugadi highlight variations in spatial planning and ritual focus. Nevertheless, the overarching trend was toward the creation of more hierarchical, visually coordinated, and collectively oriented sanctuaries. These changes emphasized spectacle, structured divine-human interaction, and integrated sacred space into broader urban and civic landscapes.

The chapter concludes by emphasizing the convergence of local and imperial architectural languages in the 3rd c. CE. At sites like Thugga, temple façades were reconstructed to resemble canonical Roman podium temples, projecting a familiar visual idiom to those approaching from major roads and valley routes. This visual homogenization did not erase regional difference but reframed it within a shared aesthetic of power and piety. The sacred landscapes of Roman Africa thus came to mirror the wider imperial order, not through assimilation but through architectural and ritual integration.

The final chapter, “Religion and the making of Roman Africa: Making empire,” offers an overview of the main themes of the book and its methodological perspective of integrating a semiotic critique with a materialist and postcolonial approach. Here McCarty again rejects the persistent essentialisms of colonial historiography, which cast African religion as immutable and indigenous culture as ethnographically fixed, arguing instead for understanding Saturn worship as a dynamic and locally adapted phenomenon shaped by imperial interaction. Practices such as molk-style sacrifice and the associated stelae evolved through time in direct engagement with Roman imperial structures. The material culture of the cult, especially stelae, was central to this reconfiguration. These monuments shifted from indexing divine presence to highlighting the role of worshippers within the community. They became tools for social differentiation and elite self-promotion, functioning more like communicative billboards than sacral objects, and these shifts cannot be disentangled from broader imperial logics of visibility, legibility, and hierarchy. In this reading, Saturn worship was not a monolithic religious system, but a constellation of locally contingent practices shaped by power and prestige. At different sites, Saturn could be the god of fertility, sacrifice, or civic benefaction, depending on the needs of worshippers and the ambitions of elites. McCarty argues for these developments as part of a broader sacrificial compromise that underpinned imperial cohesion. Sacrificial practice, across both civic and extra-urban spaces, encoded and legitimized hierarchies of wealth and authority. In this regard, the cult’s disappearance in Late Antiquity, as the result of violent Christian suppression, reflects its loss of social utility; that is, with the destruction of its connection to imperial prestige, it ceased to provide symbolic capital for elites and ceased to attract communal investment. As dedications to Saturn Augustus and other imperialized divinities waned, the connective tissue that bound provincial worship to imperial authority dissolved. Saturn’s civic sanctuaries, long sustained by the ideological and fiscal framework of empire, thus lost their institutional patrons. What remains an open question, and one not fully explored in McCarty’s account, is whether traces of Saturn’s imagery or cultic memory persisted in any form within the developing Christian culture of North Africa. While the epigraphic record falls silent, the deep association of Saturn with time, fertility, and cosmic order may have found refracted expression in Christian eschatology. To pursue this line of inquiry would require not a search for survival in the narrow sense, but an archaeology of conceptual translation between the religious languages of empire and those of the Late Antique church.

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In closing, Religion and the Making of Roman Africa succeeds as a profound rethinking of the relationship between religion and power in the ancient world. As it repeatedly demonstrates, religion in Africa under the empire was not merely a discourse of domination but a field of negotiation through which communities articulated belonging, memory, and survival. McCarty’s book has provided the groundwork for a more informed and theoretically rich conversation on the history and archaeology of Roman Africa and the religious history of the empire.