Conversations: How the Historical Sausage Gets Made, Roman Colonization of North Africa w/ Matthew McCarty
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Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, 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

goes to UBC. 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 and what biases exist in how we learn what we know about the ancient world. This is a really, really fascinating conversation about

just as this kind of perfect encapsulation of how history is influenced by history

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 and how now we

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 months ago now, maybe even three. So it was prior to the Canadian election. That only kind of comes up really briefly. But it was also prior to, I mean, I don't know. Everything going on in Gaza is worse every day.

um and 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'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, 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 structure are colonized, a colonizing structure is horrific and so utterly devoid of any kind of.

human empathy. I think one of the best ways of handling that and looking forward is to break down this type of thing, to break down how we got here and how to understand the history outside of that really terribly biased colonialist lens.

That's all to say today's episode is really interesting, really overall light, thankfully, while still talking about really important things. So I hope you enjoy. Conversations deconstructing how the historical sausage gets made. Roman colonization in North Africa with Matthew McCarty.

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? 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.

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. I think a lot of people kind of forget that the past is made by, or history is made by our interpretations of it. Yeah, I mean, there's stuff out there, right? But as an archaeologist, people think I go and I discover the stuff that's there. I do, but...

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. Yeah. 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 Suetonius might've written down. Yeah.

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 1%, but maybe, you know, the more than that. And in reality, still, the people who leave physical traces in the archaeological record, maybe we're not looking at the 1%, but we're looking at, like, the 5% or the 10% most of the time. Yeah, yeah.

So the work specifically for, I mean, our conversation, I don't know how much 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 very Roman empirical things. But yeah, is there a specific regions in North or in the Roman part of North Africa? Yeah.

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 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. 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,

Algeria, Morocco, those are the areas that I mostly work in. What in modernity, 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.

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 clear that I just didn't know what I was talking about. But why did I think that Kyrene, and also, I'm sorry, I hit my C's hard because of the Greek. But why did I think Kyrene 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 Kibbele, which is not a place, but a person. In any case, Kyrene.

The knowledge that is so very limited in terms of Rome just makes me think. So this is Carthage, and I'm sure there's lots of other places, but I know Carthage.

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, what's modern Lebanon, basically. And they are sailing west and then they are doing some trading. And as they're doing trading, they are bounding

town settlements and moving people migrating westward and in terms of like the stories we tell they're all kinds of myths there's the myth of aeneas who stops off with dido um in carthage before he continues on to you know italy to proto found rome or found proto rome um and

And, you know, we have other myths of like Hercules coming west and stopping through this region 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,

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 2000 years pretty much where we don't have

any archaeological information or any historical information about what is happening in what's modern Tunisia. Yeah. Okay. So then that leads to the question I was ready to ask anyway, which is like, 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. Yeah.

But like, of course, that makes it feel so much older. But yeah, when were they going? So now I'm just rambling because I'm excited. 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. Wow. Yeah, that's so late. Yeah.

Yeah, that's, that's, yeah, sorry. 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 going to be honest, I do not. I know there were three wars about it. Second century?

So, like, Rome, we talk about, like, Rome in Africa, and this is not something that happens overnight. Yeah. So through the course of, you know, 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, dependence in Rome.

North Africa as well as Sicily, Sardinia. 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. This is not at all relatable. Yeah, I know, right? Like, hey, let's make North Africa the 51st province. No, I shouldn't say these things. Governor Dido.

Is your audience mostly American or Canadian? They know who I am and I am the angry leftist anti-colonialist fury. So they're good. Cool. So we can say these things and I won't get angry. Oh my God. You would say the least of what I've said on this microphone.

So, yeah, right. Like this, 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 richness of North Africa. And then, you know, the story that the Romans tell is that Cato's in the Senate ending every speech with and Carthage must be destroyed. Well, basically what happens is.

There's a conflict because 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. Carthage is a little miffed at this, but Rome's ally says, hey, 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 149 to 146 BCE. And in 146 BCE, Carthage gets defeated and destroyed. And within a generation, Rome is trying to hand out this territory to turn it into a productive landscape that can serve Rome and the elite families of Rome. Okay, now I have to point out

how connected that is not at all to the 51st state bullshit, but the much more serious and deadly occupation of Palestine. Because wow. Wow.

Yeah, right. You know, just the Skippy, the Skippy is I'm sure are eyeing this thinking, let's have a let's have our own Riviera and some nice villas and, and make some nice things for our tables. 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 100 years until Julius Caesar. And that's actually we're seeing more and more really not true. Yeah.

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.

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. And that just makes them richer and richer. Yeah. And I'm just thinking about like how, 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 there, indigenous from there, et cetera, versus these people coming in and now sort of using it as like for economic means. It's like, it's like, where, where is the, what is the, how is North Africa viewed in the moment imagination and how does that transfer down? So I guess if we're thinking about Africa,

the archaeology and sort of the Western interaction with North Africa recently, how that almost like that attitude sticks in the West. Yeah. That makes sense. So, I mean, I think, right, like everyone knows North Africa is one close, right? It's a couple days sail, maybe more than a couple, but it's still easily saleable. Mm-hmm.

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. 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 close.

It is a potentially productive landscape. And so it's just, it looks really nice and profitable and right for exploitation. And then over the course of the Roman imperial period, this just continues to be the case. And there is so much effort that emperors put into turning North Africa into a breadbasket for

for Rome. We always think about 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. And then the stories that like

people tell by the first century CE, all of Africa, so Linney tells us, all of Africa is owned by five guys. We're like this whole province. And that's not the case on the ground. We can falsify that. But there's this idea 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 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, Emperor Septimius Severus. Wow. Okay. I have so many questions. I've been really interested lately in

Kind of looking at the ways that colonized, colonizer countries treat the land in comparison to the people who came before. But,

You know, particularly just because of some, you know, current events, whatever. I don't even want to say whatever. I just I'm infuriated all the time. But yeah, you know, 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 worth.

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 to like, I don't know. Do we know anything about that? So this is a great question. I would love to have a very easy answer for you. I'm not surprised if you don't. So I have, I,

a hypothesis about this that I think there is good data for. 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 in North Africa, right? Like just, you know, kind of grazing cattle in mostly forests. Because when you get to the upland parts of North Africa, you have pretty dry forests of things like pine and related plants. And

When Rome comes in and when these big landholders come in, they start to shift towards cash cropping. Not entirely, but things like olive oil production and olive oil production become one of the staples of North Africa. To do this, you've got to do a lot of irrigating, which means moving water sources around, channeling water, tapping springs,

You've also got to do what I suspect is a lot of deforestation. 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

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 in a way and encourages people to do something very specific with the landscape.

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

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, in the Arab conquest of the 7th century, and they bring with them 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 anywhere.

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. But again, we need better environmental data. Yeah, that's really interesting. It's

The Hadrian law is sticking with me. Yeah. Wow. 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 we have on this?

what ended up happening to the people who were there before? I mean, I imagine the simple answer is a lot of enslavement, but I would love to hear more of them. So 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 issues

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. 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 that's a major like one of the third largest city in the Roman Empire, basically. And that, you know, they're people who migrate.

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 who then hire managers. 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 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.

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 where 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. Yeah. It's interesting. And just so, I mean, 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.

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 the French come into North Africa and start moving colonists, giving them land, they imagine that this is exactly like the case in antiquity. So that, you know, one of the big French scholars, historians of the mid 20th century can write a whole book about modernity.

Gauls in Africa where he documents every bit of evidence we have for the proto-French moving to North Africa as colonists. And it was a weird project to even define and think about and then to publish. And that's just not what the evidence really points to. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't even, I don't know enough about archaeology. So I just want to like understand kind of how we know all of this. Gail, you're laughing at me. With. I mean, yeah. What I know is from these great conversations, but it does mean that I have fewer questions to ask. But yeah, I mean, 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 you really doing?

encountering I guess or like what does it say about the people that's a broad question so in North Africa in general 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 epigraphy, the study of inscriptions is basically the same as archaeology. But you would say that in North Africa, because all of the early archaeologists with air quotes around it were basically there gathering up Latin inscriptions. And this focus on inscriptions is

You know, like one 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 from their names. So you know, we can do that kind of analysis.

There's a flip side. There's like a dark side to epigraphy, though. In ancient archaeology, there's a dark side? There's a dark side. Whoa! I mean, it's bad with archaeology. I think it's worse with epigraphy. Because actually, one of the early people who 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 sheikh, the local headman. And, you know, the sheikh kind of looks at him and says, you can read these inscriptions? Yes.

And the epigraphist says, yeah, I can read these because these are my ancestors' letters. This is my ancestral language. And then in the French account, the sheikh goes, whoa, you are truly a descendant of

of the Romans and this land must be your land. There are so many problems with this account, but I think it illustrates some of the mentalities that, you know, these French epigraphists 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

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

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Yours. Give beautifully this Mother's Day with 1-800-Flowers.com slash ACAST. That's 1-800-Flowers.com slash ACAST. And, like, I could tell dozens of stories and anecdotes like that from these archaeological explorations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Okay, maybe this is a wild turn to take this, but 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 there's, you know, there's not actually a lot of that. How do I put it? Kind of in...

So obviously ridiculous and imaginative approach, because actually, and I think that this is even darker, the people who are there are able to couch their projects and their understandings in projects.

Yeah.

Yeah. 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, and how that makes it problematic. Yeah.

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 when it comes to that past, that archaeology that was done at that time period? Absolutely. This is a big part of my project is thinking about how every, all of our received understandings of North Africa in general are

have been so shot through with colonialism 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

people come in with to justify all of this about, you know, like Roman to French inheritance and things like that. So like all of this sits behind the knowledge that we have generated archaeologically about this region. And, you know,

You know, it's kind of like fruit from a poison tree in legal terms, right? Like everything that then 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. Yeah. Yeah.

I was not expecting this part of the conversation, but this is something I have been thinking about so much is just the, 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, to, to find it and write it down and all these different things that like impact the

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, 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 that we've done to like everyone else.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, one of my favorite examples, 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. But, but it gives you a sense. It's kind of like the Pompeii of Tunisia,

of Tunisia, 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 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 there was a modern village on top of this site.

where everyone got displaced to new Duga down the road. There's very little acknowledgement of that dynamic. And, or the fact that actually the people who didn't want to leave

actually had their houses burned down to clear some of the archaeology so that the Europeans could go in and uncover the Roman sites. And, you know, there are parts of, like, you can see a modern bath building. You can see, like, 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 yeah yeah

So what the Numidian aspect, like how, 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, that's a terrible question. It shows how little I know, but. Yeah. So right. Like even when Carthage was,

And when Phoenicians from the East were setting up little towns, they were doing so because they were trading with people who were already there. You know, it wasn't like they moved on to an empty landscape and were starting to learn more and more through new excavations about the people who were there. 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 transhumance, 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. And then here, this might be a little bit more controversial, but it seems like in the fourth century BCE,

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 right um and we see that and you know like it's from the point of view of you know the person living in Numidia

Those Numidian kings are probably just as foreign as Carthaginians or Romans. They're not 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. But 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 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 in that in-between space? Did the Greeks have much of a presence there?

Not hugely. No, okay. I mean, we have imported Greek pottery. We have, you know, some nice attic painted pottery. You know, whenever anyone excavates like a little piece of painted attic pottery, it's really exciting. But there's not a ton in absolute terms. What does become popular are some of the Hellenistic wines. Oh.

Oh. So we get lots of amphorae from Rhodes, for example, that show up in the really high end. Let's say, again, the 1% have access to Rhodian wine, and they show this off in their tombs. That's coming from a ways. That's interesting. And you think about even one of the Numidian kings, Massanissa,

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 Greek-ish practices in the Eastern Med because, well, they're also part of a Hellenistic world. They are Hellenistic, in their mind, they are Hellenistic kings. Yeah. Even if I don't know that Hellenistic kings would see them quite the same way. That's really interesting though, but they were,

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

you know, with Greek inscriptions on the bases and, you know, they're participating in this world. Yeah. They're not, they're not totally outside it. Yeah. And I think that's important to remember because North Africa as a whole is often thought of as kind of outside this world. Well,

Well, so much, yeah, of what is not explicitly Greece and Rome gets taken as this, like... Yeah, it's like outside, like, as if the Med isn't this enormously interconnected place. And it's hard when you get to Rome where they're actively, like... I mean, the stories with Carthage, at least, you know, with the degree to which, at least in the stories, they wanted to just take...

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 absolutely

No, and I think, right, like, there are different ways you can be connected to a bigger Mediterranean. 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 5th, but probably, like, the 4th, 3rd, 2nd centuries BCE. Yeah. And...

And it really is under Rome and under Roman land ownership that a lot of North Africa becomes fully part of a Mediterranean world and integrated really tightly. Yeah. So we don't, I mean, it sounds like you've basically answered this, but it's interesting to me that there isn't evidence of like Bronze Age history.

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 or anything we have so we have mycenaean pottery in parts of italy as you know we have mycenaean pottery in sicily yeah we have mycenaean pottery in sardinia and sardinia is you know like always very closely tied to north africa um although that said we

Recently, a colleague has argued that if you look at all the Mycenaean pottery in Sardinia, it could have come from one ship. So maybe we don't have to imagine like really tight connections. Maybe there's just a one-off. But in North Africa?

To my knowledge, and this could change with new excavations, but to my knowledge, we don't have a scrap of Eastern Mediterranean Mycenaean pottery in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. That's interesting. Do you think it's a lot to do, though, with the lack of excavations in that realm or time period-wise? Maybe to an extent.

And I also think there is something about it. You know, the Maghreb, this, you know, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, 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. 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 you might find in other contexts. And I think that actually a lot of North Africa sits outside that Bronze Age world. Yeah.

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

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 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 right no and that's just my like oh my god of course it was about resources wild yeah no that's it's so interesting i'm just thinking back to like

some of the Greek references to that area because I've done a lot of work on Medusa in like two troubling levels of research. And so like, I just think about North Africa a lot in that story because she, you know, was supposed to be living in the West and then eventually kind of the Gorgons were placed in the

northwest africa broadly like in varied places but there's always all these stories that come out

you know, that try to explain things or explain like the place, you know, the Greeks imagination of North Africa. And there's, there's some really wild stuff trying to connect to the Gorgons. And, and I mean, it depends on the person that I think I want to mix up who's who, but I believe it's Diodorus Siculus who says like that there was this like sort

race, I love to use the 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. There be monsters. Yeah, yeah, like snakes, the snakes in Libya. That's the thing, right? It's like the Romans looking across an island being like cannibals, they must be. Yeah.

They're cannibals. They eat their fathers, I think. We haven't talked to them or seen them or met, but, you know, probably. Seems like a safe guess, yeah. Like, oh, we saw one snake in Libya and thus, snakes. Libya is the land of snakes. All the snakes were born there. Yeah, it's interesting to kind of look at how they interpreted it and also to make sure to keep that separate from what was actually going on necessarily, but it is interesting. So, I...

Sorry, I had a thought and then I lost it completely. But you're working with mostly Roman stuff, but 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 those regions before Rome at all?

In other words, do we have like, do we have like indigenous story traditions that, you know, kind of anything that there's evidence that like, even if the, even if Rome was being inspired by stuff that was preexisting, I'm just like, I imagine there's yeah. Not a lot of necessarily connecting, but I'm just fascinated by the myth side. I think people look for that. I think what, what,

they might see is more evidence for like Phoenician stories. But basically, you know, what 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 big shift in what's going on. We have...

I'm trying to think of other stories that people tell. I mean, in late antiquity, we have an epic poem about the Byzantine reconquest of Africa after it became a vandal. And

in that we also hear a little bit about weird gods that people might have but how much of this has any bearing on reality rather than just the kinds of imaginations of people from very different traditions um i i

I have no idea. And I don't want to. Resuppose that these are. Accurate retellings. Or that these are anything. But ideologically motivated. And tied to the period. In which they are composed. 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 sort of

It just seems like so much, you know, was taken by the Romans without them necessarily like inventing it. And so I'm just kind of perpetually wanting answers there. But even the Phoenician side of it, like, I mean, the Phoenician being 800 or eighth century, whatever you said, that was, that's really interesting. That's so late. 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 of like Herodotus going through Egypt and it's like,

What do we believe, you know, about what you're saying versus like, what is your, you know, your interpretation of Egypt? 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 works in Libyan oases has tried to argue is that 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 there 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 yeah um

I 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, cause 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, trans-Saharan trade routes right. So, you know, he got something. 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. 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 are 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 West, 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 shouldn't know more about this. I want to go read some things. 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 of time. Yeah. So,

I mean, the story that gets told from, let's say, you know, when France comes in to Algeria in the 1830s and then gradually builds its own empire is basically that there are three races of people in North Africa. 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. And they come up with like descriptions of their clothes and ethnographic descriptions of like their physiognomies, what they looked like. And then we're going to 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. 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 as language groups and as practice groups and all of this. But then, you know, with empire comes regularization and standardization and categorization as a way of,

building knowledge and control and so everything gets simplified into these three people groups 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 the Phoenicians come. Then you have people from the East who come, the Phoenicians, and settle. And they become their own race group. And then you have the Romans who become the Europeans. And the racial imagination of Phoenicians

France in the 1830s and French Algeria in the 1830s basically just gets retrojected onto the past. And when you start 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 life ways, right? You have, you know, two

to the Greeks, Romans, and French, the Berbers, 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. 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 the stories that are told about the past in North Africa in favor of these race models.

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I know Michaela feels very strongly about this too. But 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 line of like you are one or you are the other. And it's so wild that just on like a logic-based scale,

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

The inhumanity, I think, of settler colonialism and this idea that like they that like one is just inherently smarter than the other because they can. 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. 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 implying this thing of no change, of just like they have stayed the same over these things. They have been the same. And that is so horrifying and terrifying in its way. Yeah. And it just, it denies any history or any ability to change or desire to change from the peoples who are living there. Yeah. And

And I think that it does a great deal of violence. Yeah, yeah.

It's so many ways. It's incredibly violent. And I think it also denies sort of, because like 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? 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. And then two groups that come in. Okay. But what if that family has lived there for 800 years?

And now they are intermingling with the people. Where is, where do you draw that distinction? And where do you draw that barrier and saying, no, these people, you know, maybe they've lived here for 800 years, but they're not, they don't care about the land or they're not of the land in the same way. Like 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, but it's,

It's strange in the way it divides a group of people and pits them against each other versus, you know, them having this shared history and this shared past. But that's part of the control, right? That's part of the... Yeah, control is the point. And so ensuring that the other people, the people that you're trying to control are inherently less is, yeah, the point. But wow, look.

And also for it to come down to a question of race is also totally ahistorical. You know, in the Roman world, race...

doesn't matter in the same way. What people care about is either much smaller family units, or what city you're from, what place you're from, 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 um

And, you know, like how race is talked about and value differs for the French, of course, you know, the Romans, Europeans, they're going to be the ones that matter. But that same thinking carries over into like contemporary cultural heritage practices in Tunisia that like stress actually that, you know, in the past, there's this special mixed race group that is, you know, like,

Punic slash African in a way that tries to camp down imagined divisions between, you know, Berber and Arab that the French tried to ban. Well, because then, like, to bring it to North America, like North American understanding, because like I'm mixed race, indigenous and Polish Ukrainian. And I remember growing up, people would say, oh, you're Métis.

And I'd be like, no. But it's this, I think, you know, like people who didn't understand thing 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. And I'm like, no, no, no. Métis is a very specific family unit. And don't even get started on how, I mean, 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 meaned.

We haven't been particularly polite to them either. But it's interesting because race is a relatively, in the grand scheme of history, in my understanding, race is relatively recent. Yeah.

And, you know, 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.

Well, that's the thing. And then it's like, well, how do you define real? Yeah. So it's like, regardless, 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, and I guess the way archaeology was, was half, was being done, you know, hopefully not so much now, but in sort of 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 the inscriptions are there they can beat it so they're like yep it's fine we're here these are our islands too 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 yeah colonialist nonsense 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 or,

or oriental groups or European groups. And one of the weirdest studies that was taken really seriously at the time, because it was by a big-named French anthropologist, went and looked at Carthaginian tombs and decided that their skulls meant that 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, really interesting and cool. They weren't actually, they were related to Mycenaeans and Minoans and Bronze Age peoples of the Aegean. Which were all a big old mixing pot of like people all over the place. You know, like the, we can laugh about it,

And yet, at the same time, these are the kinds of pseudoscientific methods that are getting applied to tell historical stories, and those historical stories have real impacts in history.

the lived experiences of so many people that they're being used either to prop up or put down. - Yeah. - And I think the way that it's like mobilized also to sort of make 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. Actually, you don't belong here. Yeah. 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 see those, those breaks. And then suddenly it's easier for a power to come in and kill everyone, kill everyone or, or, or assert themselves as control. Yeah.

which is you know i just think it's the textbook for sort of western colonialization is just go in degrade take power and use history as a weapon and i think that's one thing that yeah 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

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. Exactly. This is so spot on. 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. Right.

This inscription is speaking for itself. 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. And there's not an alternative way to understand that.

And so we can disenfranchise. Can I tell one of my other favorite stories? Because it speaks to this and it's so weird. One of my other weird, wild anecdotes. So in about 1850, you know, Algeria had been dominated by the French for about 15, 20 years at this point. Down kind of on the edge of the mountains that separate Algeria

the north part of Algeria from the south in the desert, there was a French military camp. And a French lieutenant 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. 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 and recognize that it's a centurion. So what he decides to do is, 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 there.

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. 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 to 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 there's always been European, French military heritage here.

the continuity of it all yeah oh yeah that's bizarre it's so bizarre like i did 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 is 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.

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. Yeah.

And yeah, it's like if AI starts interpreting history, like 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 centurion was buried there in 1850. Like that's exactly what it like. That's clearly what's happening. Like this is...

It's easier for me to turn everything into an anti-AI rant, but it is just so wild. No, and it's true, right? 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. Mm-hmm.

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 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. Yeah. And I do think that that is the most terrifying thing about it. Yeah. Yeah. 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 archeology, if 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 my, like, I'm, I'm a 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. But it's negative if you ignore it. Yeah. But it's the way I think that if you have all these different people working together, that can disintegrate sort of all their biases in a way that what you get out of it, then is something a little bit more akin to what

possibly happened because it's not just one perspective. It's all these different perspectives. It's like, this is a weird way to something to compare it to, but it's the Assassin's Creed games where they like literally their whole team is like, we are, we have people from different 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, but,

Still a French company. God bless their songs. 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 need to be. 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 this poor man yeah yeah yeah that's like 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 but I think right like even even then recognizing

all of the forms of diversity and non-diversity can be really important. And, you know, just to keep us on North Africa, 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 all of this 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,

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

that we all have has to be part of it. Yeah, yeah, recognizing those biases, right? Just acknowledging them, contextualizing them, and how it affects everything 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... Recognize it. 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 they won't. It's fine. They won't. It's fine. No, it's here to stay. We can try to do things without it. That'll be good. The horrors persist. They do. Horrors persist. I mean, on this light note...

Do you have any other silly, weird anecdotes that we could end on without it just being that darkness? If not, that's fine. What was the fan slap incident? Oh, that was the...

Yeah, not necessarily. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, modern. Yeah. Excuse me. That's that's modern history. So in, you know, like 1830, when when France just before France goes in with gunboats to conquer the the state, the kingdom of Algiers, of Algiers, you know,

They the reason the motive that they say for doing this is because the day of Algiers of Al Jazeera has slapped the French consul.

with a fan because the French consul was basically trying to avoid paying their bills to the day of Al Jazeera who and and you know his people who had been feeding the French army from Napoleon onwards they've been sending grain and

The day was like, hey, you've had enough grain on credit. I need to see some money. The people who've been selling you the grain need to see you pay up. And the French consul said,

He says, no, we're not paying. And they slap him with a fly whisk. And then the French are so incensed slash don't want to pay their bills, so they send gunboats to take over Al Jazeera and go from there. And that's how we get French Algeria.

Colonization is wild. I love the justification. They slapped us. They slapped us for owing a ton of money and not paying. And so, right, it becomes in 19th century Europe

Honor insults are, you know, you can understand that, I guess, if you're in the 19th century. Whereas, you know, we don't want to pay our bills reads a little bit differently. Yeah. And so context is important. Wow. Well, that was a good one. Thank you.

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 questions because you actually have a good background. I'm so glad I learned all of this, though. But is there anything you want to share with our listeners about reading more or reading anything from you? Anything you want to promote?

In terms of reading more, my colleague David Mattingly 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. And it is massive. It's like 800 pages, but it is

I think in terms of trying to kick against some of these colonial stories that we keep retelling, it does a huge job trying to move beyond them. My book that just came out called Religion in the Making of Roman Africa 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. So, you know, I think those two things as, you know, like up to date, new in the last year,

really work to retell the stories of Africa in ways that I think and I hope are really positive and hopefully transformative. Yeah. Oh, that sounds great. I mean, hearing that we're trying to break down those things 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. Thank you.

uh yeah i've now i'm forgetting how to wrap everything up because i'm just enjoying this um but thank you thank you again so much 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 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. This is really just the most incredible timing. I've been holding back because we haven't fully 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. That's awesome. 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. Yeah, I've made it sound much smarter than I have just now, but it was just 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. I love that.

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 um 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 exists as independent little beads it's up to us to figure out how to run a thread through them to make something of them um and and that's that's done in different power constellations yeah yeah oh no i yeah this is great this is so interesting i love this it was a perfect oh yeah very inspirational sign me up for the collective great

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 this, our moving, our plans moving forward. So it was really great timing. Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you.

Oh, nerds, as always, thank you so much for listening. Enormous thanks to Matthew McCarty for 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've 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. So I'm thrilled to have had her in this episode.

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. 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.

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 tiers, these Hermes Astoria 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 earned

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 um that's not looking great i am i'm working on finding ways of ensuring that the show is able to keep going um outside of that so if you are in any position to sign up for the patreon please feel

please feel free. That would be delightful. I also am incredibly understanding of those who are not because the, this, um, economic disaster is going to affect us all. Um, 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, um,

All to say, you know, I'm not saying anything's happening soon. I'm just planning for the future. Let's not go miss baby is written and produced by me. Live Albert Michaela. Pango is the Hermes to my Olympians. My incredible producer.

The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, which, again, you heard mention of at the end of that episode, which this was filmed or recorded a couple 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're in need of more questions for the next Q&A episode, so pop those in as well. Again, there's a link in the episode description. I'm also trying out voice notes, so 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. I am Liv, and I love this shit very much. ♪

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