Conversations: How the Historical Sausage Gets Made, Roman Colonization of North Africa w/ Matthew McCarty

Liv and Michaela speak with Roman archaeologist Matthew McCarty about Rome's colonization of North Africa and how that act of settler colonialism had ripple effects in the later French colonization. Find more from Matthew here https://amne.ubc.ca/profile/matthew-mccarty/. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/grouptrip.

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• 1:57Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Mythssbaby, and I am your host, Liv, here with another conversation episode. Okay, so today's episode is with Matthew McCarty, who is an Associate Professor of Roman Archaeology at UBC. And we came to his research because, well, Michaela...

• 2:21Liv Albert?

  Goes to U B C and it was absolutely delightful to speak about this. So the topic, as you'll be able to tell from my questions, is not something I am familiar with, but something I was desperate to know more about. So we talked about Roman North Africa and I mean colonialism broadly, also how the colonization of North Africa by Rome kind of led to the colonization of North Africa by France, and also how all of that ties in with archaeology and how we learn what we know

• 3:06Liv Albert?

  and what biases exist in how we learn what we know about the ancient world. This is a really, really fascinating conversation, just as this kind of perfect encapsulation of how history is influenced by everything, but also everyone who was ever involved with it, whether it was the history being made and or interpreted, but also interpreted over generations, centuries, millennia, and just what that does to what we know or what we think we know,

• 3:47Liv Albert?

  and how now we are looking at how to break down what we thought we knew, because it turns out it was all framed through an absolutely unhinged colonial lens. Really, really fascinating conversation. Of course, we talk about how this ties in with settler colonialism. Now, I will say this conversation was recorded a couple of months ago now, maybe even three. So it was prior to the Canadian election that only kind of comes up broadly or really briefly. But it was also prior to, I mean, I don't, everything going on in Gaza is worse every day.

• 4:32Liv Albert?

  And I'm, I'm just utterly horrified and, and you can tell in my, the way I try to talk about it, sometimes it's really hard and I, I kind of have to laugh through it, obviously not about what's happening, but just about the way that the, the echoes of it are felt in the ancient world because to me, it, it, it's so, it's so horrific, the way that this is something that humans in the West, the, those in power in the West have just continued to do to those who aren't from the West or aren't in power or are, you know, I mean, just, it's, it's,

• 5:16Liv Albert?

  it's tough. I just want to explain that, um, because the context of that conversation is months old. And as we all know, more is happening all the time and it's just heartbreaking. Um, but fortunately, one of the best ways, I think of handling, as people in the West who, who care and think that our governments and our, um, structure, our, our colonized, our colonizing structure, um, is horrific and, and, and so utterly devoid of any kind of human empathy. Um, I think one of the best ways of handling that and, and looking

• 5:57Liv Albert?

  forward is to break down this type of thing, to break down how we got here and, and how to understand the history outside of that really terribly biased colonialist lens. That's all to say, today's episode is, is really interesting, really overall, um, light, thankfully, uh, while still talking about really important things. So I hope you enjoy.

• 6:38Liv Albert?

  Conversations: Deconstructing How the Historical Sausage Gets Made. Roman Colonization in North Africa with Matthew McCarty.

• 7:02Liv Albert?

  I'm trying to think of how to begin this, but maybe, do you want to tell us a bit about your background in this field and like, kind of where you're coming at the research? And yeah, whatever you want to share in that kind of respect?

• 7:12Speaker 04

  Sure. I'm a Roman archaeologist, so I like to play in a giant dirt pile every year to try to understand the past and to try to understand how we make the past as we're doing that.

• 7:30Liv Albert?

  Okay, I love that phrasing. That's so relevant to a bunch of stuff Michaela and I have been working on in the back end lately, but just the saying, like, how we make the past with that is, it's such a good way of phrasing that. And I think a lot of people kind of forget that the past is made by, or history is made by our interpretations of it.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, there, you know, there's stuff out there, right? But as an archaeologist, people think I go and I discover the stuff that's there. I do. Like, I find things, but it's not like discovering the past as it was. There are like six levels of interpretation that have to happen before we get to my picture of the past that I create through the things that I find in the field.

• 8:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Archaeology is especially interesting in that way, which is, it's something that I'm only hearing more and more about from my guests than otherwise have. I did one or two classes in my undergrad. That was a long time ago. And so, yeah, it's, but it does seem to be, it's such a different way of getting to it because you get to kind of access the more real aspects of history, more real life, like everyday people. It seems like more than, you know, whatever Swetonius might have written down.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's one of the reasons I love doing this. Although, you know, it's easy to say like we can access not just the one percent, but maybe, you know, the, the more than that. Um, and in reality, still, the people who leave physical traces in the archaeological record, maybe we're not looking at the one percent, but we're looking at like the five percent or the 10% most of the time.

• 9:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So eh eh the, the work specifically for, I mean, our conversation, I don't know how much it's you go beyond that generally, but I am very interested in focusing on this, like, North African part, like, aspect. So like, what regions are you looking at? Clearly, if you're a Roman archaeologist, you're looking at all the places the Roman Empire did its varied Roman empirical things. Um, but yeah, is there a specific regions in North or, or in the Roman part of North Africa?

• 9:40Speaker 04

  So if we think about like modern North Africa and you start from the eastern side, we've got Egypt there. And Egypt kind of runs along the Nile, that's the spine. And Egypt is separated from the rest of North Africa by a desert. And you can kind of think of Egypt as like an island. And then you move over a little bit, you get to another island in kind of, um, what's now Eastern Libya, which is in antiquity, Cyrene. And then you have more desert. And then you get to an area that's kind of fit for human habitation again, that's not totally arid.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  And that is what in antiquity is Tripolitania, which is basically modern Western Libya through part of modern Tunisia. Then there's Algeria and Morocco, and those are, you know, kind of upland mountain regions with some plateaus. And it's those, like Tunisia, um, Algeria, Morocco, those are the areas that I mostly work in. Um, what in modernity, um, in Arabic, you might call the Maghreb, which just means the West, because it's like, you know, if you're sitting in the Caliphate, it's like way out there in the West.

• 11:04Liv Albert?

  Okay, so this is showing how much I am primarily knowledgeable in Greek, which is that, one, I, well, this is unrelated to that knowledge. It's clearly that I just didn't know what I was talking about. But why did I think that Kyreni, and also, I'm sorry, I hit my Cs hard because of the Greek. But why did I think Kyreni was in more like modern Turkey? That's clearly, I think I'm mixing things up in my head. That's irrelevant to this. I'm mixing it up with Kibele, which is not a place, but a person. In any case, um, I, the, the knowledge that is so very, uh, limited in terms of Rome, it just makes me think, so this is Carthage. And I'm sure there's lots of other places, but I know Carthage.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, and this is one of the things that, you know, like archaeologically and historically, our histories of this region really kind of start with Carthage or with colonists who are coming from Phoenicia, which is modern Lebanon, basically. And they are sailing west and then they are doing some trading. And as they're doing trading, they are founding towns, settlements, and moving people, migrating westward. And in terms of like the stories we tell, there are all kinds of myths. There's the myth of Aeneas who stops off with Dido

• 12:23Speaker 04

  in Carthage before he continues on to, you know, Italy to proto-found Rome or found proto-Rome.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  And, you know, we have other myths of like Hercules coming west and stopping through this region and, and bringing it into Greek imaginations of the Mediterranean. So like, our stories and our histories kind of start with Carthage, but also archaeologically. Because when we look at the archaeology of this region,

• 12:59Speaker 04

  We don't have a lot before Phoenicians start coming and bringing pottery that we can date and look at. And part of this is just people haven't really been interested to look for anything before the Carthaginians. They haven't looked for Africans in this region. So like, there's a huge gap. There's 2,000 years, pretty much, where we don't have any archaeological information or any historical information about what is happening in what's modern Tunisia.

• 13:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Okay, so then that leads to the question I was ready to ask anyway, which is like, when did, when did the Phoenicians found Carthage there? Because I'm coming at it mythologically, you know, like we've talked about the Aeneid, particularly Dido, and I know I've tried to dig in and find Dido before the Romans, or even just Carthage before the Romans, but they did quite a bit of damage to our understanding, at least mythologically. But like, of course, that makes it feel so much older. But it, it, yeah, like, when were they going? So now I'm just rambling because I'm excited.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. So like, the myths tell stories of things that happened, you know, in our kind of calendars, let's say 1200 BCE. Right? That's when people start imaginatively moving around the Mediterranean. Archaeologically, the first evidence we have for people coming from the Eastern Mediterranean and dropping stuff somewhere in North Africa, or also in Sicily, Sardinia, and even Spain. Our evidence really kind of comes from about 850 or 800 BCE.

• 14:40Liv Albert?

  Wow. Yeah, that's so late. Yeah, that's, that's, yeah, sorry.

• 14:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, and I'm just thinking about, because like, then they sort of like set up their space there and sort of, they migrated in. And then when was it, when was the, when did Rome really get control? Because like, I know I should know this, but I'm gonna be honest, I do not.

• 15:02Liv Albert?

  I know there were three wars about it.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  So, so like Rome, we talk about like Rome in Africa.

• 15:09Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Um, and this is not something that happens overnight.

• 15:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  So through the course of, you know, the, basically all of the third century BCE, there are a whole series of conflicts between Rome and Carthage. And at that point, Carthage has some kind of empire that includes, you know, dependents in North Africa as well as Sicily, Sardinia.

• 15:37Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Um, and at the end of the third century BCE, Carthage is still independent, but it doesn't have this empire anymore. And Rome has a long historical memory slash really rich people who want control of the really nice lands in North Africa.

• 15:58Liv Albert?

  This is not at all relatable.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know, right? Like, hey, let's, let's make, uh, let's make North Africa the 51st province. Um, uh, no, I

• 16:08Liv Albert?

  Governor Dido.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  Things. Um, is, is your, uh, is your audience mostly, uh,

• 16:13Liv Albert?

  American, but they know who I am and I am angry leftist, anti-colonialist fury. So they're good.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  Cool. So we can say these things and, you know, I won't get angry now.

• 16:23Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God. You would say the least of what I've said on this microphone.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  Um, so, yeah, right. Like this, I, I think really what's happening in the second century BCE is, is a couple of elite families are kind of casting their eyes to the, um, richness of North Africa. And then, you know, the story that the Romans tell is, um, that Cato's in the Senate's ending every speech with, and Carthage must be destroyed. Um, well, basically what happens is there's a conflict because the, a North African king that Rome is allied with is kind of picking at the edges of the territory that everyone had agreed would be Carthage's territory.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  Carthage is a little miffed at this, but Rome's ally says, hey, um, Carthage is fighting me. And draws Rome into conflict. And, and then all of a sudden, we have Rome involved in the Third Punic War. From one four nine to one four six BCE, and in one four six BCE, Carthage gets defeated and destroyed. Um, and within a generation, Rome is trying to hand out this territory. Um, to turn it into a productive landscape that can serve Rome and the elite families of Rome.

• 17:49Liv Albert?

  Okay, now I have to point out. How connected that is not at all to the fifty first state bullshit, but the much more serious and deadly. Occupation of Palestine, because wow, wow.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, right, you know.

• 18:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah, just selling that land.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  The skip, the skipios, I'm sure are eyeing this thinking, let's have, let's have our own Riviera. Um, uh, and some nice villas and, and make some nice things for our tables. Um, when, when they are looking at this. And, you know, in practice, it's kind of a messy affair after Carthage is destroyed. And it takes a while for Rome to kind of get its act together. For a long time, people said, you know, Rome just kind of ignored Africa. For a hundred years until Julius Caesar. And that's actually, we're seeing more and more really not true.

• 18:45Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  Um. And one of the things that also happens is like the really rich people of Italy, the wealthy families who have lands in Italy. They also have things like, you know, like they're producing. Stuff, they're producing food and tablewares. That they can export.

• 19:04Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  And sell to wider markets. So as soon as Carthage is destroyed. They get access to these new markets in North Africa to sell their products. Um, and that just makes them richer and richer.

• 19:17Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. And I'm just thinking about like how, um, like what is Rome's connection to North Africa? And sort of like how they view it within their empire as well. Cause like, if we think of it from the people who were. Living there originally from their indigenous from there etcetera versus these people coming in and now sort of using it as like for economic means um. It's like it's like where where is the what is the how is North Africa viewed in the Roman imagination and how does that transfer down? Also, I guess if we're thinking about um uh the archaeology and sort of the westerns seat uh western interaction with North Africa recently um.

• 20:00Speaker 05

  How that almost like that attitude sticks in the West.

• 20:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I mean, I think, right, like, everyone knows North Africa is one close. Right, it's a couple of days sail, maybe more than a couple, um but but it's still easily saleable.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  And this is the point that, you know, Cato makes when he can pull out a fresh fig that was grown in Carthage is hinterland and say, hey, look at this. We can have fresh produce from here um. And part of it is, yeah, they're really close, they're a threat, but part of it is we can get produce here really quickly from this place. And so it is close. It is wealthy, it is a potentially productive landscape. And and so it's just, it looks really nice and profitable. Um and right for exploitation. And then over the course of the Roman Imperial period. This just continues to um to be the case.

• 21:03Speaker 04

  And there is so much effort that emperors put into turning North Africa into a breadbasket for Rome. It's providing, you know, we always think about like Egypt as the granary of Rome and providing most of the grain. Egypt provides a lot of grain. But North Africa is providing a similar amount. And it's closer and more reliable for getting grain there. Um and then, you know, the stories that like. People tell by the first century CE, all of Africa, so Linny tells us, all of Africa is owned by five guys. You know, we're like this whole province and that's not the case on the ground. We can falsify that, but there's this idea.

• 21:48Speaker 04

  That it's like the really elite people, they control huge estates in Africa. That enrich them and the emperor is the wealthiest of them all and has the biggest land holdings of them all. And and uses his estates to really bolster his wealth. And that's why by the third century CE, we can even have. An emperor from North Africa whose wealth is fundamentally built from this productive landscape and burst of Timia Severus.

• 22:21Liv Albert?

  Wow. Okay, I I have so many questions. I've been really interested lately in. Kind of looking at the ways that colonize, colonize or countries. Treat the land in comparison to the people who came before. Um, but you know, particularly just because of some, you know, current events, whatever. Um, I don't even want to say whatever. I just I'm infuriated all the time. Uh, but yeah, you know, it it's it's a fascinating thing to to kind of look at that. Do we have evidence? Of like how it sounds like Rome was probably, you know, using the land for whatever they wanted, whatever they could make it.

• 23:00Liv Albert?

  Would make them the most money versus say like what was actually kind of best for the land in all of those, you know, ways. Do we have evidence that they, you know, cared at all or or that there was like damage done? Like, I don't know. Do we know anything about that?

• 23:16Speaker 04

  So this is a great question. I would love to have a very easy answer for you.

• 23:22Liv Albert?

  I'm not surprised if you don't.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  So I have. A hypothesis about this that I think there is good data for. Um, and this is something that I've looked at. So when Rome comes upon the scene. Yes, there's a lot of agricultural production. There's a lot of pastoralism, especially raising cattle Hmm. in North Africa, right? Like just, you know, kind of grazing cattle in in mostly forests, because when you get to the upland parts of North Africa, you have pretty dry forests of things like pine um and related um plants. And when Rome comes in, and when these big landholders come in,

• 24:08Speaker 04

  they start to shift towards cash cropping, not entirely, but things like olive production and olive oil production become one of the staples of North Africa.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  To do this, you know, you've got to do a lot of irrigating, which means moving water sources around, um channeling water, tapping springs. You've also got to do what I suspect is a lot of deforestation. Hmm. And actually, the Emperor Hadrian in the early second century passes a law that says, if you go into forests or swamplands, and you convert those forests and swamplands into like agricultural arable land, you can have

• 25:02Speaker 04

  the title, not the ownership of those lands, but you and your family get like hereditary rights to use those lands. Even if they're still, you know, like imperial lands, you don't get ownership, but you get use for you and your family in perpetuity as long as you continue to cultivate them. It's kind of like a proto homestead act. Yeah. Um, in a way, and and encourages people to do something very specific with the landscape.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  Now, there is some environmental data that suggests that one of the consequences of this is soil degradation through erosion. You start clearing forests, all of a sudden, there's a lot more erosion in the really strong seasonal rains that happen. What I would love to see is a lot more environmental work and environmental archaeology done so that we can kind of understand these processes because in the 19th and early 20th century, one of the stories that gets told of North Africa is the Arabs come in

• 26:12Speaker 04

  in the Arab conquest of the 7th century and they bring with them um huge flocks of sheep and goats and especially goats. And there's an old saying, goats make deserts because goats will nibble on any greenery that they can find and and basically kill off all the plant life, which then contributes further to erosion and desertification. And, you know, I suspect that a lot of the environmental damage is actually happening earlier under the Romans.

• 26:47Liv Albert?

  Um.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Um, but again, we need better environmental data.

• 26:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's really interesting. It's, I, the, the Hadrian law is sticking with me.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:01Liv Albert?

  Wow. I, I mean, I am trying to form like what kind of questions. I just want to hear more about all of this, but like, is there? What kind of like information do we have on what ended up happening to the people who were there before? I mean, I want, I imagine the simple answer is a lot of enslavement, but I would love to hear more than.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  So this is, this is actually like another question or another problem we have with the region and with understanding what's going on there. The old story is that we have migration.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  In colonization, that is, you know, the Romans come in and all of a sudden, a whole bunch of people from continental Europe are decamping to North Africa to set up shop and home. Um, and of course, there's some of this. We know that, for example, Augustus founds a veterans colony at Carthage that becomes the Carthage that um, that's a major, like, one of the, the third largest city in the Roman Empire, basically. And that, you know, there are people who migrate in this, but usually when we think of like land expropriation that's happening, I think it's not going to settlers, it's going to absentee landlords

• 28:24Speaker 04

  who then hire managers. Um, so, you know, in essence, there probably are many, you know, descendants of people who lived on that land, who worked that land generations before are still there. And some of these are going to be the homesteaders, right? It's not people coming from Italy as colonial homesteaders, it's people who, whose families have probably been in that land who are now taking advantage. So it's a slightly different colonial dynamic, where they're the power structures without a ton of the migration happening.

• 28:59Liv Albert?

  That sounds, I mean, it sounds like ancient colonization in so many ways, right? Like Hellenistic period, I feel like did a lot of really similar stuff, or it's just sort of like imposing yourself on those people, but not necessarily, yeah, like kicking them all out and moving yourselves all in, like there is, yeah, it's it's interesting. And just so, I mean, it's, it's a wild thing to try to wrap your head around in comparison to modern settler colonialism and just like how different that is.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  And I think that this is one of the ways in terms where we're talking about like people inventing the past after themselves and their own experience in modernity. Like when, when the French come into North Africa and start moving colonists, giving them land, they imagine that this is exactly like the case in antiquity. Um, so that, you know, one of the big French scholars, historians of the mid 20th century can write a whole book about Gauls in Africa, um, where he, you know, documents like every bit of evidence we have for the proto-French, um, moving to North Africa, um, as colonists.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  And you know, it's a, it was a weird project to even define and think about and then to publish.

• 30:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  And that's just not like what the evidence really points to.

• 30:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 30:21Liv Albert?

  I don't even, I, I don't know enough about archaeology. So I just want to like, understand kind of how we know all of this. Gil, you're laughing at me.

• 30:30Liv Albert?

  With. I mean, yeah, that's, eh, eh, what I know is from these great conversations, but it does mean that I have fewer questions to ask. Um, but yeah, I mean, what, like, when it comes to the kind of stuff you're actually working with, like material culture, like what are you? What kind of stuff are, are, are you really encountering, I guess? Or like, what does it say about the people? That's a broad question.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  So in North Africa, in general,

• 31:01Speaker 04

  most of the archaeology that's been done has focused primarily on urban and monumental sites. I don't think there's any other place in the Mediterranean where you'd say apigraphy, the study of inscriptions is basically the same as archaeology.

• 31:18Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  But you would say that in North Africa, because all of the early archaeologists with air quotes around it, um, were basically there gathering up Latin inscriptions.

• 31:30Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  And this focus on inscriptions, you know, like one, eh, it's historically helpful in some ways, right? We see a lot about individual named people in a way that we don't get in other parts of the ancient world. So we can kind of trace their, their biographies, um, from their names. Um, so you know, we can do that kind of analysis. There's a flip side. There's like a dark side to apigraphy, though.

• 31:59Liv Albert?

  In ancient archaeology, there's a dark.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  There's a dark side.

• 32:03Liv Albert?

  Whoa.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Um, I mean, it's, it's bad with archaeology. I think it's worse with apigraphy.

• 32:09Liv Albert?

  Ooh.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  Because actually, one of the early people who colle- made this collection. There's a story told about him where he shows up in Algeria, he's cataloging all of these Latin inscriptions, and he's brought to meet with like the local sheik, the local headman. And, you know, the sheik kind of looks at him and says, you can read these inscriptions? And the apigraphist says, yeah, I can read these because these are my ancestors' letters. This is my ancestral language. Um, and then in the French account, the sheik goes, whoa, you are truly a descendant of the Romans, and this land must be your land.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  Um, there are so many problems with this account, but I think it illustrates some of the mentalities that, you know, these French apigraphists were coming with. That, you know, that by understanding Latin and something that the people who live here don't, we automatically have a claim to this land and to this territory. Because, look, there's physical proof that the people who live here now are not related to the people who lived here, you know, 2,000 years ago, because they can't understand the language, whereas I can.

• 33:34Liv Albert?

  Wow. Yeah, that's the dark side, I would say. Um, it's one of those moments where I'm like, this, this is, this is not a video, uh, medium. So I need everyone to know the level to which my eyes rolled, uh, when I was first hearing that. Because like that, I mean, it also just sounds like one of those Western stories, right? Where it's just like, look, this, this man, the powerful man of the region gave me the okay that I can, this is mine.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:02Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 34:15Liv Albert?

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• 34:58Liv Albert?

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• 37:28Speaker 04

  And like I could tell dozens of stories and anecdotes like that

• 37:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  from these archaeological explorations in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

• 37:40Liv Albert?

  Okay, maybe this is a wild turn to take this, but it's... It just makes me think of Atlantis. Was there a lot of like... Was there any Atlantis nonsense? Because I just, it makes me feel like, because that's like the region, and those are the people who would go in and be like, "I've found Atlantis", and those people are always tied to some really dark stuff. So I mean it from a dark, nonsensical perspective, but...

• 38:03Speaker 04

  There's, you know, there's not actually a lot of that.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  How do I put it? Kind of in like so obviously ridiculous and imaginative approach because actually, and I think that this is even darker, the people who are are there are able to couch their projects and their understandings in scientific and positivist terms in ways that I think actually conceal those underlying power dynamics much more artfully.

• 38:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  And so, you know, this is why, like the scholarship that French scholars active in North Africa produced is really hard to dismiss and really hard to kind of push against and and demonstrate just just how ideologically fraught it was.

• 39:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  And how that makes it problematic.

• 39:11Liv Albert?

  So is that a lot of what you're working with then is like also trying to not break down, but it's the phrase I couldn't find right now, like what when it comes to that past, that archaeology that was done at that time period?

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Absolutely. This is a big part of my project is thinking about how every, all of our received understandings of North Africa in general have been so shot through with colonialism in in epistemologies, in how people think they know what they know. In practices, in what is chosen for excavation and how it's excavated and what kinds of things are then published, like the Latin inscriptions to demonstrate this point about ownership to the kinds of wider narratives that people come in with to justify all of this about, you know, like

• 40:11Speaker 04

  Roman to French inheritance and things like that. So like all of this.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  Sits behind the knowledge that we have generated archaeologically about this region. And you know, it's kind of like fruit from a poison tree in legal terms, right? Like, everything that then get comes out of this is problematic, but it's so far removed from those, you know, French colonial origins and it's been repeated so many times since then that we don't always realize just how problematic it is.

• 40:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I was not expecting this part of the conversation, but this is something I have been thinking about so much is just, yeah, this way that history, and I say that word broadly to mean kind of all of it, but just the way that it is so determined and and like interpreted by the people who were privileged enough for all of those many, in all those many ways, you know, it it to to find it and and write it down and all these different things that like impact how we understand something and yet, you know, to sort of the everyday person, it's just kind of generally acknowledged like history is history.

• 41:25Liv Albert?

  You know, without that, that like added layer that really affects so much and and especially when it comes to the West and the damage we've done to like everyone else. Um, yeah, that's.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  I mean, one of my favorite examples, there's, there's a really famous site in Tunisia called Duga, modern Duga. And it's like every tour group that comes to Tunisia, every tourist individually, like they hit, they stop here. It's close to Carthage, it's close to Tunis and it is, it looks really well preserved. It's not actually well preserved. It's been pretty heavily rebuilt in the colonial period. Um, but but it gives you a sense. It's kind of like the Pompeii of of Tunisia. Um, it gives you a sense of immediacy of the past and you go there and people will talk about it as a Punic slash Numidian

• 42:23Speaker 04

  town. So like African slash Carthaginian town and a Roman town, those three phases of history. What you don't see in like the tourist maps or in the guidebooks is the fact that um, there was a modern village on top of this site.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  Where everyone got displaced to New Duka down the road. There's very little acknowledgement of that dynamic.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  And or the fact that actually the people who didn't want to leave actually had their houses burned down to clear um to clear some of the archaeology so that the Europeans could go in and uncover the Roman sites. And you know, there's um there are parts of like you can see um a modern bath building. You can see like a modern um parts of a modern mosque still there, but those are like completely blank on the maps you find in any tourist guidebook um or any like, you know, introduction to the site um in ways that I think are really problematic.

• 43:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. So what the Numidian aspect like how it it it I don't know what quite to ask about that. I just want to know more about like the Africa outside of the Rome of it all. But like, was there a big kind of presence there? I don't know what it that's a terrible question. It shows how little I know, but.

• 43:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, so right, like even when Carthage was founded and when the Phoenicians from the east were setting up little towns, they were doing so because they were trading with people who were already there.

• 44:08Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  Um, you know, it wasn't like they moved on to an empty landscape. And we're starting to learn more and more through new excavations about the people who are there. But but basically we have lots of people. They are divided into probably extended kin groups and clans and, you know, and probably have, you know, known patterns of migration for transhumans pastoralism. They start to build more and more monumental towns in a period when the whole Mediterranean is starting to fall in love with living in nucleated settlements and towns. Um, and then

• 44:53Speaker 04

  here, this might be a little bit more controversial, but it seems like in the fourth century BCE.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  A really powerful set of leaders emerges that brings together a lot of these clan groups in tighter ways and into things that for Greek and Roman authors get called kingdoms.

• 45:16Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  Um, and we see that and you know, like it's from the point of view of, you know, the person living in Numidia, um, those Numidian kings are probably just as foreign as Carthaginians or Romans, you know, they're, they're not like in your town, they're not part of your daily experience, they're still extracting resources and labor and grain primarily from you as a worker. Um, but you know, maybe, maybe they speak at least a similar language. And then, you know, they're kind of the in-between people. And one of the things that I talk a lot about are like the kind of local elites who are trying to figure out where do we

• 46:00Speaker 04

  fit in a world where on one side of us, there's Carthage and then Rome, and on the other, these kings who are demanding different kinds of tribute, how do we fit into this world? Um, in that in-between space?

• 46:16Liv Albert?

  Uh huh. Well, did the Greeks have much of a presence there before?

• 46:22Speaker 04

  Um, not hugely.

• 46:24Liv Albert?

  No, okay.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  I mean, we have imported Greek pottery. Um, we have, you know, some nice attic painted pottery and, you know, whenever anyone excavates like a little piece of painted attic pottery, it's really exciting. Um, but, uh, but there's not a ton in absolute terms. Um, what does become popular are some of the Hellenistic wines.

• 46:49Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 46:50Speaker 04

  So we get lots of amphorae from Rhodes, for example, that show up in like the really high end, let's say, you know, again, the one percent.

• 47:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  Have access to Rhodian wine, um, and they show this off in their tombs.

• 47:08Liv Albert?

  That's coming from a ways. That's interesting.

• 47:11Speaker 04

  And you know, you think about like even one of the Numidian kings, Massanessa, he is shipping grain to Delos. He is sending, you know, Numidian kings are sending athletes and horse teams to compete in, you know, the big Pan-Hellenic Games and sometimes winning. And so they're engaging in some of these Greekish practices in the Eastern Med because, well, they're also part of a Hellenistic world. They are Helleni- in their minds, they are Hellenistic kings.

• 47:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Speaker 04

  Even if I don't know that Hellenistic kings would see them quite the same way.

• 47:58Liv Albert?

  That's really interesting, though, but they were, I mean, that, that's just a good reminder of what I love so much about that region is just the way that it was such a, like, I don't like the word melting pot, but in a lot of ways, like, it does kind of fit to the degree where they were, like, permitted, I, and clearly, like, I mean, imagine welcome to a degree to be competing in that kind of stuff. Like, that's really interesting.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, we have statue honors set up to Numidian kings, you know, with Greek inscriptions on the bases, you know, they're participating in this world.

• 48:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  They're not, they're not totally outside. And I think that's important to remember because North Africa as a whole is often thought of as kind of outside of this world.

• 48:45Liv Albert?

  Well, so much, yeah, of what is not explicitly Greece and Rome gets

• 48:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:50Liv Albert?

  taken as that's like,

• 48:52Speaker 04

  the side.

• 48:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's like outside, like as if the Med isn't this enormously interconnected place. And, and it's hard when you get to Rome where they're actively like, I mean, the, the stories with Carthage at least, you know, with the, the degree to which, at least in the stories, they wanted to just tear it down completely. So then it becomes that it's like harder to kind of wrap your head around the idea that there was once this, at least for a time, this period where it was interconnected in that way. And I mean, like, I would have always assumed generally that it was pretty interconnected, but there's something about being able to send people to the games that feels like even more like welcomed. Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  No, and and I think, right, like, there are different ways you can be connected to a bigger Mediterranean.

• 49:38Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:39Speaker 04

  And and I will say that actually, one of the surprising things that is coming out of new excavations is that this deep interconnection actually does happen kind of late, like, it does happen in maybe the fifth, but probably like the fourth, third, second centuries BCE.

• 49:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  And and it really is under Rome and under Roman land ownership that that a lot of North Africa becomes fully part of the Mediterranean world and integrated really tightly.

• 50:17Liv Albert?

  Hmm. Yeah. So we don't, I mean, it sounds like you've basically answered this, but it's interesting to me that there there isn't evidence of like Bronze Age shared culture or share or like even just like pottery shared or whatever, like, we don't really have much at all from the Bronze Age or anything.

• 50:33Speaker 04

  We have, so we have Meissenean pottery in parts of Italy. As you know, we have Meissenean pottery in Sicily.

• 50:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 04

  We have Meissenean pottery in Sardinia, and Sardinia is, you know, like, always very closely tied to North Africa.

• 50:50Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  Um, although that said, recently, a colleague has argued that if you look at all the Meissenean pottery in Sardinia, it could have come from one ship. So maybe maybe we don't have to imagine like really tight connections.

• 51:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:06Speaker 04

  Maybe, maybe there's just a one off. Um, but in North Africa, to my knowledge, um, and, you know, this could change with new excavations. Um, but to my knowledge, we don't have a scrap of Eastern Mediterranean Meissenean pottery in Tunisia, Algeria, um, Morocco.

• 51:28Liv Albert?

  That's interesting. Do you think it's a lot to do, though, with, like, the lack of excavations, like, in that realm or or like time period wise?

• 51:38Speaker 04

  Um.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  Maybe to an extent. And I also think there is. Something about it, you know, the. The Maghreb, this, you know. Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. Um, has often been compared to a set of islands, right? Kind of like an archipelago because it's got Mediterranean to the north. It's got mountains. Breaking it up east and west, and then you've got the Sahara to the south. Um, and, you know. You can cross islands, you can cross archipelagos and move among them, but at the same time. You don't do it as frequently. There's not as tight. A kind of connection as.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  As you might find in other contexts, and I think that actually. A lot of North Africa. Sits outside that Bronze Age world.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  And so maybe, maybe we'll find one shipload of Mycenaean pottery. Um, but we're not going to find. The density that. You know, that we seem to be finding in parts of Italy.

• 52:48Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, yeah, especially it makes sense with the desert because they even, you know, the ships were the main thing that were able to kind of spread everything. So if you're separated by something that isn't water, like that isn't this thing that they've sort of figured out. Um, it would make sense, even if it's just sort of like. Not an intentional avoidance, but just sort of like, yeah, they just didn't necessarily end up there in the same way. Um.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the other thing to keep in mind is that like. North Africa doesn't have. Some of the metal resources. That seem to be driving all of the connections. I mean, they, they do, they're just not really exploited until later.

• 53:27Liv Albert?

  Right. No, and that's just my like, oh my, of course, was there other resources? Wild.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:35Liv Albert?

  No, that's it's so interesting. I'm just starting thinking back to like some of the the Greek references to that area because I've I've done a lot of work on Medusa in like like two troubling levels of of research and and so like I I just think to about North Africa a lot in that story because she you know was supposed to be li- living in the West and then eventually kind of the Gorgons were placed in in Northwest Africa broadly like in varied places but there's all the all these stories that come out later you know that try to e- explain things or explain like the place you know the Greeks imagination of North Africa and

• 54:20Liv Albert?

  there's there's some really wild stuff um trying to connect to the Gorgons and and I mean it depends on the person that I think I was want to mix up who's who but I believe it's Diodoro Siculus who says like that there was this um like some race against love to use word race race of like women warriors who were part Gorgon part Amazons and they lived in that area it's like basically I just I like the idea that they were trying to imagine it feels like they were so separated kind of from that that they were just sort of imagining some really wacky stuff.

• 54:54Speaker 04

  They're be monsters.

• 54:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, like snakes, the snakes in Libya, that's.

• 54:59Speaker 05

  It's like the Romans looking across at islands being like cannibals, they must be. Cannibals, they eat their fathers, I think. We haven't talked to them or seen them or met, but you know, probably.

• 55:09Liv Albert?

  It's like a safe guess, yeah. Like, oh, we saw one snake in Libya and thus snakes that Libya is the land of snakes, the all the snakes were born there. Yeah, it's just it's interesting to to kind of look at what how they interpreted it and also to make sure to keep that separate from like what was actually going on necessarily, but it is interesting.

• 55:32Liv Albert?

  So I, sorry, I had a thought and then I lost it completely. Um, but is there, you're working with mostly Roman stuff, but I'm, I'm very interested in mythology, unsurprisingly. Do we know, like, Dido is this character who seems like mostly invented by the Romans to kind of go along with all of their madness? Do we know much about mythology of that, those regions before Rome at all?

• 56:01Speaker 04

  Um, in other words, do we have like, do we have like indigenous story traditions that, you know, kind of?

• 56:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah, or anything that there's evidence that like, even if, even if Rome was being inspired by stuff that was pre-existing, I'm just in like, I imagine there's, yeah, not a lot of necessarily connecting, but I'm just fascinated by the myth side.

• 56:23Speaker 04

  Um, I think people look for that. I think what they might see is more evidence for like Phoenician stories. Um, but basically, you know, what?

• 56:41Speaker 04

  Um, the short answer is we don't know a lot. We don't have a lot of stories. We have weird things, again, from the Roman imperial period where we have reliefs of gods with, you know, strange names that we don't recognize. And people always say, oh, that's part of, you know, like a pre-Roman religious tradition. And it might be, but the fact that they're being, you know, cut into stone and looking like Greco-Roman gods with slightly different attributes is part of, you know, a, a big shift, um, in what's going on.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  Um, we have, um, I'm trying to think of other stories that people tell. I mean, in late antiquity, we have a poem, an epic poem about the Byzantine reconquest of Africa after it, you know, became vandal. Um, and in that, we also hear a little bit about weird gods that people might have.

• 57:48Speaker 04

  But how much of this has any bearing on reality rather than just the kinds of imaginations of people from very different traditions?

• 57:59Speaker 04

  I I have no idea.

• 58:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 04

  And I don't want to presuppose that these are accurate retellings or that these are anything but ideologically motivated and tied to the period in which they are composed.

• 58:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, I guess that's why I'm so interested in that because Dido, just Dido has always consumed me along with the Greek Aeneas I stand by, like I'm, the, the stories of them before the Aeneid propaganda is just so interesting and also like infuriating because there's very little to be found. Um, but it, but then just to, to sort of, it, it just seems like so much, you know, was taken by the Romans without them necessarily like inventing it. And so I'm just going to perpetually wanting answers there. Uh, but it, it, even the Phoenician side of it, like, I mean, the Phoenician being eight, eight hun- or eighth century, whatever you said, that was, that's really interesting. That's so late.

• 59:00Liv Albert?

  And I don't know, I don't have a form on this, even what you said earlier about like the Byzantine side. It reminds me like Herodotus going through Egypt and it's like, what do we believe, you know, what about what you're saying versus like, what is your, you know, your interpretation of Egypt?

• 59:18Speaker 04

  Um, I mean, Herodotus, like Herodotus tells us a bunch of stories also about Libya. Although one of the neat things that one of my colleagues who, who works in Libyan Oasis has tried to argue is that, um, Herodotus actually had a pretty good sense as he's mapping out Oasis to Oasis of what a Trans-Saharan trade route might have looked like. Um, and you know, sometimes, sometimes maybe he gets it right. But again, that's like about the, the kind of history and ethnography and not the kinds of myth stories that people are telling.

• 59:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 59:59Liv Albert?

  But also think it's like, it's important to think that maybe he got some things, right? Just so long as we, you know, like, because it's unlikely that he got it all wrong. And so it's just also, I mean, it's a good reminder that we just, you know, keep, keep an open mind about what you're reading. Like, I don't think he got a hippopotamus, right? But he could have gotten these, you know, transer and trade routes, right? So, you know, he got something at least. Well, is there like, sorry, I'm just trying to form a question just to hear more about any of this, but like, yeah, please.

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  I definitely do. Because we were talking about, because what I find interesting about North Africa is sort of like this way. It's almost like divided into threes and sort of understanding the people groups who were there. And the way that sort of like travels down, like you have, you know, like the people who are like indigenously from there. And then you have the people who are moving in from the east, the Phoenicians, the Arab conquest and so on. And then you have the, the Wests, like Roman or the French coming in and stuff. And the way that they interact off each other. But I find that at least, because I didn't know much about North Africa really until you introduced it to me. And I was like, oh, I should know more about this or to go read some things.

• 1:01:13Speaker 05

  But I feel like everything is from this perspective of the Romans or the Phoenicians or like all these different people who are moving in. And I wonder how much is the archaeology actually changing to try to, like, how much interest is there now that is saying, okay, can we actually see with the people who were here or indigenous to here? And maybe actually how the people on the ground were interacting with each other between these groups and sort of the way that functioned at various points in time.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  So, I mean, the story that gets told

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  from, let's say, you know, when France comes into Algeria in the 1830s

• 1:01:57Speaker 04

  and then gradually builds its own empire, is basically that there are three races of people in North Africa.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  Now, as the French are looking around, they're cataloging them and they're saying, ah, we have Berbers, the indigenous people of North Africa.

• 1:02:15Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  And they come up with like descriptions of their clothes and ethnographic descriptions of like their physiognomies, what they looked like. Um, and then we're gonna also come up with a race of Arabs. Those are the people who came in during the Islamic conquest and subsequently. And then we're going to look around and we're going to say they're Europeans, mostly like the French who are coming and settling.

• 1:02:42Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:02:42Speaker 04

  What's interesting is that the moment of colonialism, these three racial groups largely get set. If you look at European travelers who visit North Africa before the French come in and dominate. They actually paint like a much richer picture of the diversity of the people there. Um, as language groups and as practice groups and and all of this. But then, you know, with empire comes regularization. Um, and standardization and categorization as a way of building knowledge and control. And so everything gets simplified into these three people groups.

• 1:03:26Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:03:27Speaker 04

  Well, you start looking at the way that stories of the past get told in North Africa. There are also three people groups in the ancient past. There are the Berbers. And the same term gets used to describe the modern people and the ancient people who are there before um, before the Phoenicians come. Then you have people from the east who come, the Phoenicians, and settle, and they become their own race group.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  And then you have the Romans who become the, you know, the Europeans and the racial imagination of France in the eighteen thirties and French Algeria in the eighteen thirties basically just gets retrojected onto the past. And when you start kind of pushing at it a little bit, we actually see that there is so much more going on that we have lots of much smaller people groups who may or may not think they have anything to do with one another, who have very different lifeways, right? You have, you know, to, to the Greeks, Romans and French, the Berbers.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  Well, the Berbers, actually they're people who are living pastoral lifestyles in the pre-desert or who are developing like oasis agriculture, which takes its own kind of living.

• 1:04:57Speaker 04

  And then you have people who settle into farming and agriculture and other forms of pastoralism. And, you know, whether they speak the same language, I don't know. But I suspect these would have seemed like very different groups to the people who are living in them. And all that just kind of gets ironed out in, in the stories that are told about the past in North Africa in favor of these race models.

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• 1:07:16Liv Albert?

  It's that, I know Michaela feels very strongly about this too. But it just, it's always so interesting to me because obviously this applies to North America and so many other settler colonial states, where it's just like this, this line of like, you are one, or you are the other. And it's so wild that just on a, on like a logic-based anything, like, it's so wild to think that Europe could be very clearly made up of all of these different cultures and people in all of these tiny little spaces, and they wouldn't dare say it's all the same. But Africa, North America, oh, just one, just bam, it's the, you know, it's the Berbers,

• 1:08:01Liv Albert?

  it's the Indians, to use that horrible word because it's appropriate in this case. But like, it's, it's ridic, it's so on its face nonsensical, and it just betrays so much of the...

• 1:08:13Liv Albert?

  The inhumanity, I think, of settler colonialism and this idea that like they that that like one is just inherently smarter than the other because they can, you know, I don't even know. There's just, obviously, there's so many layers of darkness to that. But just on its face, it's so absurd and it becomes hard to fathom.

• 1:08:31Speaker 05

  And and I think also using the same word for the people, you know, the indigenous people. That is so like, you know, it's insidious in a way because it's it's implying this thing of um of no change of just like they have stayed the same.

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  They have been the same.

• 1:08:48Speaker 05

  And that is so horrifying and terrifying in its way because.

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and and it just it denies any history.

• 1:08:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  Or any ability to change or desire to change um from the peoples who are living there.

• 1:09:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Speaker 04

  Um, and and I think that it does a great deal of violence.

• 1:09:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah. In so many ways.

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Speaker 05

  It's incredibly violent and I I think it also um denies sort of because like the I've I've I've often thought about like, you know, how long do people need to be on a land for it to become for it to matter to them?

• 1:09:27Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:28Speaker 05

  Oh, and if you know, the way they split them into these three groups, essentially, we have one group that is of the land. Sure. Okay.

• 1:09:34Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:09:34Speaker 05

  And then two groups that come in. Okay, but what if that family has lived there for eight hundred years? And now and they are intermingling with the people. Where is where do you draw that distinction? And where do you draw that barrier barrier and saying, no, that these people, you know, maybe they've lived here for eight hundred years, but they're not. They don't care about the land or they're not of the land in the same way. Like, i- i- it's it's creepy. It's weird. And, you know, you see it happen out here as well in various ways that I don't have the energy to get into right now. Um, but it's. It it's strange in in in the way it divides a group of people um and pits them against each other versus, you know, them having this shared history and this shared past.

• 1:10:18Liv Albert?

  But that's part of the control, right? That's part of the, yeah, it it the control is the point. And so ensuring that the other people, the people that you're trying to control are inherently less is is, yeah, the point. But wow.

• 1:10:35Speaker 04

  But and and also for it to come down to a question of race

• 1:10:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  is is also totally ahistorical. Um, you know, in the Roman world, um, race doesn't matter in the same way. What what people care about is either much smaller family units.

• 1:10:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Speaker 04

  Or what city you're from, what place you're from. Um, or what political group you belong to. Like, those are the things. And those things aren't necessarily based on genealogical descent. But for the French, and ever since French colonialism, it is race that matters.

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  And, you know, like how race is talked about and valued differs for the French, of course, you know, the Romans, Europeans, they're going to be the ones that that matter. But but that same thinking carries over into like contemporary cultural heritage practices in Tunisia that like stress actually um that, you know, in the past, there's this special mixed-race group that is, you know, like Punyx slash African in a way that tries to tamp down um imagined divisions between, you know, Berber and and Arab um that the French tried to fan.

• 1:12:06Speaker 05

  Hmm. Well, because then, like, um, to bring it to North America, like North American understanding, because like, like, I'm um mixed race, I indigenous and Polish Ukrainian. And I remember going up, people would say, oh, you're Maite. And I'd be like, no.

• 1:12:24Speaker 05

  But it's this, I think, you know, like, people who didn't understand thing when they, when they hear, okay, you're indigenous, plus other things, plus Western, okay, that means you're now this special group because that's what the Métis are, isn't it? And I'm like, no, no, no, Métis is a very specific family unit, and don't even get started on how, I mean, I don't, maybe I don't want to be saying, no, I'll say it, I don't even get started on how some indigenous people treat Métis people. We have been mean. We haven't been particularly polite to them either. Um, but it's, it's interesting because race is a relatively, um, in the grand scheme of history, in my understanding, race is relatively recent.

• 1:13:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Speaker 05

  Or sort of the way that we understand race today.

• 1:13:05Liv Albert?

  Construct of our, yeah, of race.

• 1:13:07Speaker 05

  Um, and you know, in, uh, in one, in the class I'm taking, they, you know, one of the things the teacher asked was, she asked us all, like, is race real? And it was so interesting because she had, you know, us put our hands up for yes or no. So many people put their hands up for no, and I so confidently put my hand up for yes. And I was just like, what are you talking about? Yes, it is real, not in the way that I think we are taught it's real, but in the way that it affects us.

• 1:13:29Liv Albert?

  Well, that's the thing. And then it's like, well, how do you define real?

• 1:13:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's like, it, it, regardless, um, it, it, it's, but it's because it's a modern construct now, so it's so deeply set in our culture, that when we go out and in, um, and I guess the way archaeology was, was half, was being done, you know, hopefully not so much now, but in sort of in the beginnings, it became so much a part of it because you're, if you have this understanding of racial groups, um, and you want to sort of prove something, or prove a connection, or get a justification for your powers being there and doing whatever they're doing, you want to show that. And I think that just kind of comes back to what we were saying at the beginning where, you know,

• 1:14:15Speaker 05

  the inscriptions are there, they can beat it, so they're like, yep, it's fine, we're here, these are our, our lands, so too, it's, uh.

• 1:14:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, that's what makes me think of Atlantis and why I had to ask about it, because like, just all of those insidious constructs of race and heritage and like how they're often tied to Atlantis, just, you know, it just screams like it's all from the same book of.

• 1:14:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah, colonialist nonsense.

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  And like in, you know, in French North Africa. People did what was racial science, right? They went to tombs and they measured skulls and they tried to decide, you know, did this person descend from, you know, like African groups?

• 1:14:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  Oriental groups or European groups. Um, and one of the like weirdest studies that was taken really seriously at the time because it was by a big named French anthropologist, um, went and looked at Carthaginian tombs and decided that their skulls meant that, you know, the punics, the Carthaginians were actually Europeans. So, you know, it meant that they could actually, you know, have great things and be, you know, re- really interesting and cool. Um, they, they weren't actually, they, they were related to Mycenaeans and Minoans and Bronze Age peoples of the Aegean.

• 1:15:36Liv Albert?

  Um, which were all a big old mixing pot of like

• 1:15:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Liv Albert?

  people all over the place.

• 1:15:41Speaker 04

  And, you know, like, the, we can laugh about it. Um, and yet at the same time, these are the kinds of pseudo-scientific methods that are getting applied to tell historical stories and those historical stories have real impacts in the lived experiences of so many people, um, that they're being used either to prop up or put down.

• 1:16:12Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:13Speaker 05

  And, and I think the way that it's like mobilized also to sort of make, um, colonial violence easier where if you go into a group of people and then you go, actually, you're not the same. And actually, you should be pitted against each other.

• 1:16:25Liv Albert?

  Or actually, you don't belong here.

• 1:16:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, you, you, you break down sort of the connections in the barrier. And like, if you do it for long enough, suddenly it's, people won't see themselves as like, or from this, you know, they'll, they'll see those, those breaks. And then suddenly it's easier for a power to come in and.

• 1:16:43Liv Albert?

  Kill everyone.

• 1:16:44Speaker 05

  Kill everyone, or assert themselves as control. Um, which is, you know, I just think it's the textbook for sort of Western codization is just go into grade, take power.

• 1:16:57Liv Albert?

  And use history as a weapon. And I think that's one thing that.

• 1:17:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah, is more and more, I mean, it's always been an issue, but like, I, I mean, every day it gets scarier. But yeah, like that use of history as a weapon, or this idea that history is, uh, what's like, my finding the correct word is troubling now, but like, that history can't be denied that there is, that it is objective. That's what I want. Like, this idea that history is objective is such a dangerous thought, and especially when you look back at everything you're talking about, all this French archaeology.

• 1:17:29Speaker 04

  Exactly. This is so spot on. And, and I think, you know, French North Africa is one of the cases where we see this because it's all done in the language of positivism. Well, this is what is there. This inscription is speaking for itself. Um, and, you know, this is what the science of craniometry and measuring skulls tells us. It's cast in that kind of objective register when there's nothing at all objective about it. But then you can say, oh yeah, this is the past, you know, with a capital P. Um, and there's not an alternative way to understand that. And so we can disenfranchise. Can, can I tell one of my other favorite stories?

• 1:18:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:15Speaker 04

  Speaks to this and it's so weird. One of my other weird, wild anecdotes. So in about 1850, um, you know, Algeria had been dominated by the French for about fifteen, 20 years at this point. Down kind of on the edge of the mountains that separate um, the north part of Algeria from the south and the desert. Um, there was a French military camp. And a French lieutenant was trying, who had had a classical education, was trying to occupy his troops. And so they started doing archaeology on a Roman military camp nearby and excavating it.

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  And while they're excavating, they find the grave of a Roman centurion, which has an inscription over it. And of course, you know, because he's classically trained, he can read the inscription, recognize that it's a centurion. So what he decides to do is,

• 1:19:19Speaker 04

  you know, like, take this guy, this centurion, out of the ground, build him a brand-new tomb, and have a full 19th-century French military funeral for this Roman centurion, and rebury the guy in this brand-new tomb with a new inscription. As a way of drawing that unbroken connection back to the past, like, French military honors, Roman military honors, French officer, Roman officer. This is really, really weird. In the 1850s, no one is doing this with human remains that get excavated.

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  Like, around the same time, the French are excavating all of these Gallic sites that, you know, are like, they're using to build up their national identity in France. They're not having funerals for the human remains they found. It's only when you're in North Africa that you do this because you have to build the physical traces of that historical narrative that then self-perpetuates. Because, look, now you can point to this new tomb with the inscription that demonstrates the way that, um, that there's always been European-French military heritage here.

• 1:20:45Speaker 05

  The continuity of it all.

• 1:20:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah. That's bizarre.

• 1:20:50Speaker 04

  It's so bizarre.

• 1:20:52Liv Albert?

  Like,

• 1:20:54Liv Albert?

  I ju- I mean, I think about that with, with, like, I mean, anything, it's so hard, because when it comes to this type of stuff, like, there's so many things that somebody could have done something weird like that, and we'd never know, and then, like, it affects how we interpret something later, and it's like... Yeah, I mean, it's another great reminder that history is objective. It is not, or that is subjective, that it's not objective, that it's, that it's like entirely up to the interpretation and their inherent biases and like all of those things that go into just being human. It reminds me of why AI is so fucking terrifying is that like they're trying to use it

• 1:21:35Liv Albert?

  to replicate humanity, but all of the things that we would, we need it to like, everything is requires being interpreted by a human in order for it to like be a real thing. And yeah, it, it's like if AI starts interpreting history, like it, it's going to be utter fucking nonsense. And there's going to be all these tech bros telling us that it's the truth and it's going to be like, oh, well, obviously a Roman Ceturion was buried there in 1850. Like, that's exactly what it like, that's clearly what's happening. Like, and this is, it's easy for me to turn everything into an anti-AI rant, but like, it is just so, it's so wild.

• 1:22:12Speaker 04

  No, and, and it's true, right? Like, you know, what I'm trying to do in North Africa is to point out that we have to look at where our knowledge comes from and how our knowledge is made. And the thing about AI, as you say, we don't know where that knowledge comes from and how it's made. It is hidden in some backend algorithm that is so susceptible to manipulation. And, you know, like in my case, I can try to get rid of or, or disentangle some of this because we can see the process of how historical pasts are manufactured. You'll never be able to do that with AI.

• 1:22:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Speaker 04

  And I do think that that is the most terrifying thing about it.

• 1:23:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:02Speaker 05

  And I think that's where the strength at least now, when we're, the way that, um, or at least I hope the way studying history and classics and archaeology is trying to get all these different voices and all these different biases and people from everywhere coming together. Because like, at the end of the day, Liv knows, like, I'm, I'm fascinated with, um, With bias and in a way that like and like for me, it's not a negative word. It's just sort of there is no escaping it. Everybody has bias. Um, but it's

• 1:23:32Liv Albert?

  Negative if you ignore it.

• 1:23:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, it but it's the way I think that if you have all these different people working together, um, that can disintegrate sort of all their biases in a way and what you get out of it then is something a little bit more akin to what possibly happens because it's not just one perspective. It's all these different perspectives. It's like, um, this is a weird, um, way to something to compare it to, but it's the Assassin Creed games where they like literally their whole team is like we are we have people from different uh, race groups, cultures, sexualities, genders and everything as much as possible so that when we make these games, it's not just from one perspective. That being said, still a French company. God bless their

• 1:24:17Speaker 05

  but that makes me happy that their game that took place in France was the worst one. So it's fine, but it's I think that's what we we need to be. Um, that's the best way to address history is to sort of have everyone from all these different walks of life and all these different perspectives working together so that it's not just, you know, one group who's being fucking weird about it and doing weird stuff like let's rebury this man who this poor man.

• 1:24:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:47Speaker 05

  That's like I they just needed like one like indigenous person there standing off to the side being like, what are you doing? Don't be fucking weird about it, man. Like just leave him there. What are you doing? Oh.

• 1:24:59Speaker 04

  But I think, right? Like even even then, recognizing all of the forms of diversity.

• 1:25:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:06Speaker 04

  Um, and non-diversity

• 1:25:09Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:10Speaker 04

  can be really important. And you know, just to keep us on North Africa.

• 1:25:14Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:15Speaker 04

  One of the things that, you know, a lot of scholars working the region trumpet is we have more colleagues who are born and raised in North Africa who are North Africans contributing to our projects and being involved in the conferences and and all of this and and seeing that as a way of decolonizing. And I think all of that is great. What I think is neglected is the fact that These North African scholars have been sent to France to get their degrees, to be trained in the French academic system.

• 1:25:54Speaker 04

  And then they they come back and and are using the same colonial models to understand the past. So just, you know, they're they're from North Africa.

• 1:26:05Speaker 04

  That's not the kind of diversity of understanding or the kind of critical lens alone that we need to do this. And so, you know, recognizing the kind of processes of training and socialization that we all have has to be part of it.

• 1:26:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, recognizing those biases, right? Just acknowledging them, contextualizing them. And and how it affects everything that that then comes out of that human, because humans are made of their biases. And that doesn't mean it's not valuable, but like, yeah, you just have to be aware of it in order to. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, put it into context of like, this is where it's coming from, because we're all human, thank God, and hopefully AI doesn't start trying to interpret. I mean, I'm sure it already is interpreting history, but I just hope it goes away and it won't. It's fine.

• 1:27:02Speaker 05

  Fine. No, it's here to stay.

• 1:27:05Liv Albert?

  We can try to do things without it. That'll be good.

• 1:27:08Speaker 05

  The horrors persist.

• 1:27:10Liv Albert?

  They do.

• 1:27:11Speaker 05

  Horrors persist.

• 1:27:15Liv Albert?

  I mean, on this light note.

• 1:27:19Liv Albert?

  I would, do you have any other like silly weird anecdotes that we could end on, but without it just being that that that darkness? If not, that's fine.

• 1:27:28Speaker 05

  What was the, what was the fan slap incident? Oh, that was, oh, that was the, the, yeah, not necessarily. Yeah, no.

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, the, um, I mean, that's, you know, modern, yeah, excuse me. Um, that's, that's modern history. So in in, you know, like eighteen thirty, when, um, when France, just before France, goes in with gunboats to conquer the the state, the kingdom of Algiers, of Algazir.

• 1:28:04Speaker 04

  They, the reason, the motive for, that they say for doing this is because the day of Algiers, of Algiers has slapped the French consul with a fan, um, because the French consul was basically trying to avoid paying their bills to the day of Algiers, who, um, and, and, you know, his people who, um, had been feeding the French army, um, from Napoleon onwards, they'd been sending grain. And, you know, the day was like, hey, you, you've had enough grain on credit. I need to see some money. My, the people who've been selling you the grain need to see you pay up.

• 1:28:46Speaker 04

  Um, and the consul, the French consul says, no, I'm not, we're not paying. Um, and the day slaps him with a fly whisk. And then, you know, the French are so incensed slash don't want to pay their bills. So they send gunboats to take over Algiers, um, and go from there. And that's how we get, um, French Algeria.

• 1:29:14Liv Albert?

  Colonization's wild. I love the justification. They slapped us. Let's.

• 1:29:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. And so that.

• 1:29:21Liv Albert?

  Owing a ton of money and not paying.

• 1:29:24Speaker 04

  And, and so, right, like it, it becomes in, in 19th century Europe. Honor insults are, you know, you can understand that, I guess, if you're in the 19th century. Um, whereas, you know, we don't want to pay our bills reads a little bit differently. Um.

• 1:29:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And so context is important.

• 1:29:49Liv Albert?

  Wow. Well, that's, that was a good one. Thank you.

• 1:29:53Liv Albert?

  Oh, thank you so much for doing this. This has been utterly fascinating. It has also proven how little I know. So thank you, Michaela, for jumping in with, um, questions because you actually have a good background. Uh, I'm so glad I learned all of this though. But is there anything you want to share, uh, with our listeners about, uh, reading more or, or reading anything from you, anything you want to promote?

• 1:30:14Speaker 04

  Um. In terms of reading more, uh, my colleague David Mattingly um just put out a huge book called Between Sahara and Sea. That is like a history of ancient North Africa and an archaeology of ancient North Africa that is synthesized. Um, and it is massive. It's like eight hundred pages. Um, but it is. I think in terms of trying to kick against some of these colonial stories that we keep retelling. It it does a huge job trying to move beyond them. Um, my book that just came out called Religion in the Making of Roman Africa.

• 1:30:57Speaker 04

  Um, also really tries to understand this process of how in modernity we have made North Africa and then how that looks different from the ways that Roman Africa gets made using some of the same ideological tools as modern colonial empires. Um, so you know, I think those two things um as you know, like up to date, um, new in the last year, um, really work to retell the stories of Africa. Um, in ways that I I think and I hope are are really positive and hopefully transformative.

• 1:31:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, that that sounds great. I mean, any hearing that we're trying to break down those things and and and just being aware of them in order to sort of understand that history, I think, is so important. So I'm thrilled to know both of those exist. Thank you. Uh, yeah, I've now I'm forgetting how to wrap everything up because I'm just enjoying this. Uh, but thank you. Thank you again so much.

• 1:32:01Speaker 04

  Thank you and thank you for the good questions and the interest and and for being willing to, you know, really foreground um how the historical sausage is made. Um, and the problems with it. Um, and you know, the fact that we need to rethink um everything that has been done because it's a product of the power systems of our own world more than any antiquity or ancient world that's just out there.

• 1:32:33Liv Albert?

  This is really just the most incredible timing. It's I'm like been holding back because we haven't fully like announced everything yet. But Michaela and I have been building sort of the framework for a collective of creators and educators who are doing exactly that. Like I just, I actually just wrote.

• 1:32:51Speaker 04

  That's awesome.

• 1:32:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I just wrote out like a bunch of our founding documents yesterday. And essentially breaking down this idea of history as something that has been interpreted by the people in control and all of that.

• 1:33:06Speaker 05

  Created and all that stuff.

• 1:33:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I've made it sound much smarter than I have just now. But it was just, yeah, incredible timing to be like, oh, this is what our conversation's about. So we are working on that. That is the goal is we just literally want to bring as much of that kind of way of looking at history as possible to the public. So this is a perfect start.

• 1:33:28Speaker 04

  I love that. And I think that is so important. And I can see, you know, how how that ties in really nicely with myths, you know, going from talking about myths told in the ancient world to, you know, myths told about the ancient world and the ways that, you know, all of this is about making narrative and and making narrative is about asserting some kind of power over things that otherwise just exist as independent little beads. It's up to us to figure out how to run a thread through them to make something of them. And and that's that's done in different power constellations.

• 1:34:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, no, yeah, this is great. This is so interesting. I love this. It was a perfect, oh, yeah, very inspirational.

• 1:34:15Speaker 04

  Sign me up for the collective.

• 1:34:17Liv Albert?

  Great.

• 1:34:19Liv Albert?

  We're announcing everything over the next couple of weeks. But yeah, just truly incredible timing. So I'm just thrilled to, yeah, hear this, that basically exactly what we're trying to do in such a very specific way. And it, yeah, it was very, it's been inspirational for for this, our moving, our plans moving forward. So it's really great timing.

• 1:34:40Speaker 04

  Awesome. Well, thank you.

• 1:34:42Liv Albert?

  Thank you.

• 1:34:58Liv Albert?

  Nerds, as always, thank you so much for listening. Enormous thanks to Matthew McCarty for this conversation. You can find more about him and his work with the link in the episode's description. And enormous thank you for Michaela to setting this up. More and more, Michaela is jumping in with not only guest suggestions, but also in the episodes themselves. I'm really encouraging that. You might have noticed in that episode that it's also a bit of a learning experience trying to navigate how that happens because I have been doing this alone for so long and I feel silenced. Michaela's trouble getting a question in, but it is something that we're working on and I'm trying to get her more and more involved.

• 1:35:42Liv Albert?

  So I'm thrilled to have had her in this episode.

• 1:35:46Liv Albert?

  And hopefully many, many more to come. If you want to hear more from me and Michaela really specifically, sign up to our Patreon, which certain tiers have access to Hermes Historia episodes, which are these bonus episodes that we're making. You've seen a few of them in the feed towards the end of last year when we were making them and not having them behind the paywall. They are now behind the paywall, but they're really fun and really casual, but really fascinating way of Michaela explaining moments in history to me. We just recorded one at the time that I'm recording this and it was really, really fun. So if you're interested in that, check out the Patreon.

• 1:36:28Liv Albert?

  The Patreon now also has access to all past episodes, almost 700, if not 700 by this point of the podcast, ad-free. You can listen directly in Spotify or wherever, or via the RSS feed.

• 1:36:44Liv Albert?

  You have to set that up. In any case, you can listen anywhere. But all of that is now available ad free, along with, like I said, on some Tierzies Hermes Historia episodes and lots of other bonus stuff. The Patreon is also now becoming the most important way of maintaining the show long term, because 90% of the money that I have been, I mean, receiving and what has kept the show going all of this time and pays Michaela's salary is via American advertising dollars. And if you can believe it, that's not looking great. I am, I'm working on finding ways of ensuring that the show is able to keep going outside of that. So if you are in any

• 1:37:27Liv Albert?

  position to sign up for the Patreon, please, please feel free. That would be delightful. I also am incredibly understanding of those who are not, because the, this economic disaster is going to affect us all. So, you know, do what you can. This show will still be available free for as long as we can do it, which I, I mean, someone's gonna have to pry this show out of my cold, dead hands. So, all to say, you know, I'm not saying anything's happening soon. I'm just planning for the future. Let's Talk O Myths, baby, is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pangowish is the Hermes to my Olympians, my incredible producer. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network,

• 1:38:12Liv Albert?

  which, again, you heard mention of at the end of that episode, which this was filmed a couple, or recorded a couple of months ago. So it was a little dated now. We are still working on getting lots of things up and running with the Collective, but things are coming. It's just slow, because I'm one person who's also signed on to write a book. And, you know, here we are. But you can learn more at collectivemem.com. There's a link in the episode's description. And we are in need of more questions for the next Q and A episode. So pop those in as well. Again, there's a link in the episode's description. I'm also trying out voice notes. You can find a link to that as well. I would love to get voice notes from you all to play in the episodes and answer. So, check that out.

• 1:38:55Liv Albert?

  I am Liv and I love this shit very much.

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  Series by Marriott is part of Marriott Bonvoy. Book direct at Marriott.com or on the Marriott Bonvoy app.

• 1:40:26Speaker 12

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed and the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for watch or iPad required. Addition terms apply for all offers.

• 1:40:56Speaker 06

  Granger knows, if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Costs climb. Too little? Production slows. Granger's $2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need, when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 1:41:29Speaker 13

  "Enemy of My Dreams" by Jenny Williamson is a historical romance novel set in the time of the late Roman Empire, where Alaric, a brutal Gothic warlord, and Julia, a Roman princess, with a love of good wine, team up to take down Rome.

• 1:41:46Speaker 14

  The much-awaited sequel, Game of Thieves, comes out December 8. In this sequel, Julia and Alaric must overcome centuries of conflict to work together, or the turbulent riptides of rebellion and the demons of their past will tear them apart.

• 1:42:00Speaker 13

  And now, for a limited time, when you preorder Game of Thieves through Burning Pages Bookstore, you'll get a signed book plate and a free art print of one of Jenny's favorite spicy scenes from across the series.

• 1:42:13Speaker 14

  Get this amazing artwork only from Burning Pages at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves. Don't wait. Order your copy from Burning Pages today at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves.