Bonnie Effros. Incidental Archaeologists

The archaeological study and conservation of Algeria’s Roman remains was born out of the region’s violent colonization starting in 1830. While over the past two decades a steady stream of publications on the uses of the Roman past under French colonial rule has effectively demystified “pristine and romanticized narratives of classical archaeology in Algeria” (26), Bonnie Effros’s new study does so in a particularly astute way. The book strikes a middle ground between two approaches in the literature on the topic. Designed as a general study of French archaeological, conservational, and intellectual engagement with North Africa’s antiquities, Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa interrogates their immediate military contexts and political implications and thus goes beyond the study of particular actors and institutions. At the same time, Effros keeps her gaze tightly focused on the first four decades of French hegemony and does not try to situate French archeological pursuits during that period within a broader long-term panorama of colonial conservational and commemorative cultures and knowledge production in Algeria. The result is a diligently researched history of early amateur-driven efforts to study and conserve Algeria’s Roman past in all its contradictory and violent details. More than anyone before, Effros lays bare how deeply enmeshed the largely self-appointed French custodians of Algeria’s Roman past—most of them military officers—were in deeply destructive forces. They may have come to the study of the Roman past incidentally, but these officer-archaeologists were by no means innocent (167). While their conquest and control of the territory probably constituted the single most destructive moment for Algeria’s Roman monuments, some of them came to revere those monuments as remnants of the region’s pre-Arab European past and as a source of legitimacy for the “return” of European rule in the guise of French colonialism.

Ancient history · Archaeology · African Studies and Ethnography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies