This chapter works to historicize and materialize a family of ritualized practices (molk-style rites) related to the burnt offering of perinatal infants, their deposition in a sanctuary space (conventionally dubbed “tophets”), and the dedication of carved-stone monuments alongside the deposits. Instead of religious permanence or diffusion, it argues for four moments, each with distinctive dynamics, that led communities to embrace these rites. First, between the eighth and fourth centuries BCE, these rites were tied to Phoenician colonization; then, between the fourth and second centuries BCE, the adoption of molk-style rites was tied to migration from these colonial centers. But in the long first century BCE, the boom in molk-style rites was instead tied to the creation of a new, interconnected civic elite in the space between Numidian kingdoms and the Roman province of Africa. Finally, in the second and third centuries CE, migrations related to the Roman army drove the foundation of new sanctuaries to Saturn where stelae (and often molk-style offerings) were dedicated. Stele-sanctuaries were deeply entangled with the power dynamics and institutions of empire.

The concluding chapter reflects on how re-materializing worship and elevating a plurality of localized little pictures over the colonial big picture of Africa in antiquity can contribute to decolonizing North African studies. The chapter synthesizes evidence for how stelae participated in and shaped changing worship practices, and how these recursively reproduced imperial hegemony.

Chapter 3 focuses on some of the signifiers that have long been argued to provide proof for how Punic culture survived and persisted through molk-style rites, especially the “sign of Tanit,” the crescent, and terms like sufete. Instead of continuities, these signs were appropriated and visibly transformed by the new elite of the first century BCE. It was not meanings, significances, or interpretations that bound togther these worshippers from Mauretania to Tripolitania, but rather the signs themselves. Rather than veneers that can be dismissed as epiphenomena, signifiers had the power to create imagined communities, and they did so within a Third Space distinct from the markers of prestige embraced by Numidian kings and Roman authorities.

While most accounts see worshippers of Saturn as indigenous Africans or rural peasants, this chapter argues that stele-dedicants used stelae to articulate positions for themselves within the frameworks of the wider empire. Unlike earlier stelae, which worked to imagine stele-dedicants as a horizontal community of equals, stelae dedicated from the first century BCE onward became billboards that asserted the prestige of dedicants in the deeply localized but also vertically structured world of the Roman Empire. This can be seen in the adoption of new anthropocentric iconographies that adapt a koine of imagery, the composition of stelae, and new titles for worshippers like sacerdos that are borrowed from a civic sphere.

This chapter argues that a significant number of central figures shown on stelae were not the dedicants of the stelae, but instead used visual markers that identified them as children. In the first century BCE, children were most often aged and gendered in depictions by their nudity. At sites of the second and third centuries CE, by contrast, the images of children shared iconographies and conceptualizations of their subjects with funerary monuments for children from across the empire. In particular, togas, scrolls, pets, and hairstyles, as well as showing the figures older than they were, reflects how child offerings were being reconceived as social persons and subjects of empire.

This chapter challenges the supposed transformation “from Baal Hammon to Saturn” in North Africa one of the chief grounds upon which narratives of cultural continuity are predicated. It argues that instead of simple syncretism or the persistence of a god, the material signs used to construct and identify the deity to whom stelae were dedicated underwent important transformations in the second and third centuries CE, changes closely tied to the experiences and practices of empire. Stelae of the third and second centuries BCE made a god present indexically; stelae of the imperial period embraced iconicity in ways that were entangled with empire, including new divine epithets tied to imperial authority and new road systems in the province. And by the end of the second century CE, this iconic system could even work to perpetuate clear social hierarchies.

The new conceptualization of molk-style rites shown in Chapter 7 led to shifts in how sanctuaries were structured and in the entailments these new structures had for the communities who used them. While past studies have focused on the movement from open-air stele fields to monumental sanctuaries as evidence of “Romanization” or the creation of “Romano-African” temple-types, this chapter argues that these new built temples instead participated in wider civic-style practices of benefaction and spectacle in ways that sought to foreground sacrificer-benefector figures. At the end of the second century CE, a number of stele-sanctuaries were rebuilt in monumental forms that privileged central altars, the spectacle of animal offering, and dining. This shift in the spatial dimension of worship afforded new possibilities of practice and social ordering that closely resemble those of the wider imperial world, creating a “sacrificial compromise” where local forms of authority were predicated on being central to the pageantry of sacrifice.

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.