Petrographic Characterization and Provenance Determination of the Crystalline Marbles Used in the Roman City of Banasa (Morocco): New Data on the Import of Iberian Marble in Roman North Africa

This paper reports the results of an archaeometric study of the crystalline marbles used in the Roman city of Banasa (Morocco). On‐site surveys allowed a detailed inspection of the monuments of the ancient city and sampling of the different marble lithotypes used for architectural purposes and sculptures. The inventory was completed by the study of both the grey‐and‐white streaked or spotted marble items stored in the warehouse of the archaeological site and of those currently exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum of Rabat. Provenance determination of 28 samples was carried out by means of a multi‐method approach combining mineralogical–petrographic data and C–O stable isotope analyses as the first step, and cathodoluminescence microscopy as a complementary technique to verify possible unusual alternative origins of some marbles. The analytical results obtained were compared with both the most reliable international databases and the few available studies dealing with the use of marble in other Roman towns in Morocco (e.g., Volubilis, Thamusida and Sala‐Chellah). They point to a variety of classical marble sources such as Carrara, Mount Penteli, Paros, Marmara and probably Mount Filfila (Algeria), and prove a significant import of Iberian lithotypes.     

Brutes, beasts and empire: veterinary medicine and environmental policy in French North Africa and British India

The deep, and persistent, colonial roots of many contemporary environmental policies around the world have been increasingly recognized over the last decade. Research in the sectors of agriculture, forestry, human medicine, and public health has illuminated how environmental policies were constructed and utilized during the colonial period, as well as how many of these policies remain influential today. This paper examines the as yet little explored contribution of colonial veterinary medicine to the development and implementation of environmental policy. By comparing the experiences of the French in North Africa and the British in India, it demonstrates that some colonial veterinarians had a great deal of influence on environmental policy while others had very little. In French North Africa veterinarians played a significant role in developing rangeland management policies that impacted large swaths of these three territories, policies that can still be felt today. In British India, by contrast, the role of colonial veterinarians in developing environmental policy was much more circumscribed and, in the end, largely inconsequential. The paper suggests that three primary factors account for most of this dissimilarity: the differences in animal diseases present in India and the Maghreb; the differences between French and British veterinary education before the twentieth century; and the differences in colonial administration between the two European powers.     

Introduction: North Africa and Britain

This special issue of International Affairs seeks to stimulate more debate and interest in Britain on North Africa. This relatively neglected area of British foreign policy has largely been funneled through the European Union (EU), where the focus of policy has been on preventive security, above all policing against illegal migration and the spread of radicalism and terrorism. The main driver for regional change and potential insecurity is now demographic, evident in the high levels of youth unemployment across North Africa. In facing the challenge of leadership successions over the next decade, it is in the interest of the EU, and in turn, Britain, to engage more closely with North Africa's younger generations to ensure the region's longer term security and stability. Britain has few strong bilateral links with North African societies, however, with the exception of private sector investments in the energy sector and security cooperation. New investment opportunities and a demand for English language and other forms of training for employment could put Britain at an advantage in responding to North African demands for diversified international relationships. A greater focus is also needed on local development opportunities to assist new actors to assume their own economic and political roles, as a better means of delivering security and jobs than relying on central states to deliver both. The articles in this special issue offer new insights into developments in the region, as well as analyses of European and American policy responses to the challenges identified. A common theme is that the region has been held back by a combined lack of institutional safeguards and political participation, with negative impacts on the spread of the economic benefits of higher growth rates and investment. Authoritarian leaderships have proved reliable partners for the EU and Britain in the past, but will they continue to do so in future?     

Invisible men: mobility and political change on the frontier of late Roman Africa

The political hierarchies that developed in North Africa in the post‐Roman period have traditionally been ascribed either to invading groups from the Sahara, or to indigenous elites who transformed their political authority to respond to changing circumstances. The present article suggests that such interpretations have neglected the role played by seasonal pastoralists within the emergence of these new polities. Human mobility was a crucial feature of the late antique Maghreb, as analysis of the later Roman frontier system reveals. Equally, contemporary anthropological scholarship emphasizes the influence that mobile groups can have in periods of social and political upheaval and their capacity for hierarchical stratification. The article offers two brief case studies, and argues that Antalas, leader of the ‘Frexes’ in southern Byzacena, and the occupants of the ‘Djedar’ tumulus mausolea near Tiaret, are best viewed as products of a mobile society.     

Threads: Collecting Cloth in the North American French Colonies

Trade of European-produced cloth and clothing enabled indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitants of colonial New France to rethink the “hand-woven”, impacting how self could be presented through dress. At the same time, objects were being collected in New France for cabinets of curiosities and museums. These different collections resonated in different ways through history, subsequently influencing modern understandings of colonial cloth and clothing. This paper examines colonial experiences of cloth by looking at archaeological remnants of cloth and cloth production as compared to how indigenous and non-indigenous colonial peoples were and are being represented by cloth and clothing in museum collections.     

Cross‐North Sea Contacts in the Roman Period

The North Sea formed a barrier to contact between Britain and the Continental regions north of the Rhine prior to the late fourth century AD. Whilst there is evidence for sporadic contacts between these two regions prior to this date, in the main these contacts probably occurred indirectly via the south Dutch/Belgian/north French region. From the late fourth century onwards, we have evidence for considerable cross‐North Sea contact, first in the form of Saxon piracy, and from the early/mid‐fifth century onwards, as population movements principally directed from north‐west Germany to south‐east England. The reasons for this change are outlined and discussed.     

French military officers and the mapping of West Africa: the case of Captain Brosselard-Faidherbe

Through the study of projects conceived to shape colonial space, this article aims to reconsider the motives and means of French colonial expansion in West Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. The Plan Faidherbe, designed by the Governor of Senegal in the 1860s, outlined a plan for eastward development, including a road and rail link between the Senegal and the Niger Rivers (and beyond, between Algeria and Sudan). The implementation of these routes of penetration called for a number of military-led topographic missions. The study of these missions and of the maps that were produced at the time reveal how such projects and their implementation were mediated by both cartographic and field practices. The case of Captain Henry Brosselard (1855-93), General Faidherbe’s son-in-law, is an interesting example because of the diversity of the missions he led and the extent of territory which he traversed and mapped. This case also shows how, in the course of a career, an officer could assume several different functions and come to conceive the process of building colonial territory from different perspectives. This paper questions a common view of the military as having a purely strategic vision of space as a field of conquest, a view which reserves a more development-oriented outlook for civil administrators and the business community. Indeed, Brosselard’s varied career somewhat blurs the conventional divide between civilians and soldiers, requiring us to reconsider accepted ways of categorising colonial actors.     

North Africa between Christians and Arabs

Vandals, Romans and Berbers. New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa. Edited by Andy H. Merrills (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), xv + 347 pp. £55.00 cloth.     

Archaeologists Colonizing Canada: The Effects of Unquestioned Categories

The labelling and categorization of archaeological sites have consequences for the interpretation and subsequent research completed. As such, we as archaeologists must always be vigilant regarding the unintended consequences of labels we attach, or choose to omit, from official site information. These problems become compounded when governmental control codifies existing archaeological conventions and renders them rigid and difficult to change. Using the current archaeological registration database information for Brant County, Ontario, Canada, this paper demonstrates how imaginary pasts are created through archaeological convention and governmental codification and the consequences of these uncontested actions.     

Public Significance and Imagined Archaeologists: Authoring Pasts in Context

This paper explores how archaeological authorship is an articulation of the imagined social roles archaeologists play with the actual contexts of our practice. The discovery of popular public discourses on archaeology should not be seen as impediments to pure archaeologies, but as routes to the significance archaeology seeks to attain. A parallel concern with the determining influence of public concerns in ethnography is reviewed to develop a method for an archaeology that is truly publicly formed. An example of a public archaeology program developed in dialogue with existing historical debates in Annapolis, Maryland illustrates.