Paul Gauckler et les recherches sur la religion de la Tunisie antique

Paul Gauckler est l’initiateur des premiers et grands projets d’inventaire et de recherche qui ont marqué le passage de la recherche de l’oeuvre d’art à la documentation scientifique rigoureuse. Son projet sur les monuments historiques, et notamment le volume publié sur les temples «païens», témoigne de cette prise de conscience. Ses études personnelles sur les basiliques chrétiennes, couronnées par une publication posthume, constituent l’aboutissement de sa carrière brillante d’archéologue qui a posé les bases solides du Service des Antiquités et des Arts de Tunisie.

Louis Carton (1861-1924) et les religions d’Afrique

Médecin militaire, Louis Carton découvre la Tunisie en 1886 et s’adonne avec passion à l’archéologie. Il y découvre de nombreux sites, et devient une référence dans ce domaine, même s’il entre rapidement en lutte avec les autorités archéologiques officielles. Plus spécialisé dans les domaines de la colonisation romaine et des travaux d’irrigation, il aborde cependant à de multiples reprises le champ religieux.

Contemporary Historiography on Christianity in Vandal and Byzantine Africa (1785-2020)

The present chapter examines the historiography of Vandal and Byzantine religion from ca. 1785 to the present. Until relatively recently, extended studies of post-Roman North Africa were scarce. The works of Charles Diehl (1896) and Christian Courtois (1955) are striking exceptions within a field primarily interested in earlier periods of North African history. During the 19th century, the Vandals were primarily viewed for their military and political activity, rather than their religious policies, and Byzantine Africa was generally presented as a coda to Roman and early Christian periods of occupation. The dramatic expansion of archaeological and philological scholarship in the latter part of the twentieth century had an important effect upon the understanding of these groups, but it is only in the last twenty years that detailed scrutiny of the later periods of pre-Islamic North Africa have become widespread.

Contemporary Historiography on the Beginnings of Islam in North Africa

The 7th century CE was a turning point in the evolution of North Africa, with the Arab-Muslim conquest ushering in a period of decisive change. This study seeks to develop a grid for reading the contemporary historiography on this period. We begin by focusing on the origins of studies of the topic and then turn to a división between Western and Arab authors, in order to provide a sense of the geographical specificities of the extant scholarship. In doing so, we are able to see how the Arab conquest and the arrival of Islam in the region have been represented, and then observe the gradual development of the scholarship on this period into a fully-fledged field of historical studies.

Post-Colonial Rome, and Beyond

Roman archaeology is one of the major subfields of archaeology in which post-colonial theory has flourished, and not just in relation to the role of the past in the present, but also as a means to approach the interpretation of the Roman world itself. The region of North Africa was a major focal point for some of the earliest post-colonial studies on the Roman Empire, and has remained an arena of investigation for scholars influenced by the Anglophone debate on post-colonial theory, which emerged in the 1980s and flourished in the 1990s, often with a focus on Roman Britain. Religion is both a key source of evidence and an obviously important theme in understanding cultural change, interaction and power, and thus it has likewise been of interest to scholars from within and beyond the region. Here, I give an overview of the work of some of the influential Roman archaeologists working within the post-colonial tradition. I also consider the complex intersections of ancient and modern, and of Britain and North Africa, found in this body of work, and evaluate the impact this tradition of thought continues to have on Roman archaeology going forwards.

En guise de conclusion : «Une archéologie du même et de l’autre»

Conclusion