French imperialism, Roman ruins & Algeria with Dr. Bonnie Effros

Gary: Today’s episode is an interview with Dr. Bonnie Effros. Effros received her Ph.D. from the University of California Los Angeles. She is currently a professor at the University of British Columbia. She has published multiple books on Merovingian archeology. Her most recent work takes her closer to the modern age and is the subject of our discussion. Her book Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa, 1830-1870is the Winner of the French Colonial Historical Society’s 2019 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize recognizing the best book dealing with the French colonial experience since 1815. The book covers French interactions with Roman ruins in the newly-conquered territory of Algeria. The work is a brilliant and complex examination of ancient artifacts, French imperialism and indigenous lives.

Well, thank you so much for being with me, Doctor Effros. Your book Incidental Archeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa is a truly fantastic work. What led you to this topic?

Bonnie: Thank you so much for having me. So, I guess for me I sort of fell into this project and as a scholar who had worked prior to this on national archeology and provincial archeology within France, focused on the early Middle Ages. I had a deep interest in thinking about the rule of archaeological societies, and I noticed that similar organizations have been established in North Africa, and I turned at that point to thinking about whether there was the possibility of working on the history of archaeology in North Africa. But as I got deeper into this project, I began to look at the list of members who were part of these archaeological societies, which are frequently listed at the beginning of each of their volumes. I realized that there was an absence of any names that were in Arabic, that indicated a presence of the indigenous population in these organizations. Which is quite different from France because often you would have local notables who would join these organizations. These were essentially groups that promoted the learning of an area of a region that took great pride in the history of that area and the archeology. But what you see in North Africa is that the list included many officers. Now my training was actually as an early medievalist, and for me thinking about North Africa initially was that it was part of the Roman world, that there shouldn't be so many differences. It was quite naive because of the way I came into the history of archaeology, and so, it was quite late that it dawned on me that the structure of the way that archeology was structured in North Africa is a direct result of colonization efforts, of the conquest of colonization, and that the way in which this work was done was oriented towards a European population rather than an Indigenous population, and that was really the spark for me of the way in which I did this work. Now, of course, there was work that had been done on this project, most importantly the work of (??) here, and that really is what made it possible for me to think where I could sort of bring in the perspective I had from working on the way that archeology developed national archeology within France and to think about the distinction between that and what was happening in North Africa. But truly, then, the work became about the conquest, and so I really wanted to focus on the period that, most of the histories focused on the period after the 1870’s and especially after the 1880’s, when the French sort of set up formal institutions in North Africa to address the question of archeology. In the period before that, in the midst of the war, I was interested in what the dynamic was, because individuals, in some senses, particularly members of the military, had a lot of latitude in terms of how they wanted to shape their studies. So that's really sort of the way in which this project occurred. It was not the project that I thought it would be at the very beginning, because I was thinking about things like vandal archeology, which isn't studied in the period I was interested in, and so the book project as a whole shifted then to thinking about Roman archeology, which plays in this period between 1830 a period of the conquest, and 1870 the largest role, And of course, what also made this project possible, was the funding that I got from the Rothman Foundation at the University of Florida, where I was when I began this project, and I also had support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as from the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, which allowed me a year for the writing of this, and I also spent a year in France, at the University of Poitiers where I was a visiting scholar. So, the kind of work that was involved, especially since I was relatively new to the study of North Africa it was these kinds of resources that made sort of the deep archival dives that I needed to do in order to make this possible. That's that's really how how it transpires.

Gary: Funding makes good work possible, so don't forget to support your historians. You touched on this a little bit, but your book really deals a lot with negative space. The surviving sources are virtually, if not entirely, all, in French by French citizens. How do you go about uncovering the perceptions, attitudes and relations between the indigenous peoples of what is now Algeria with the Roman ruins?

Bonnie: Yeah, that's a difficult question, but I think it's a very important one. I think that in the history of archaeology, when you think about the grand narratives, the great discoveries that were made, largely in the narratives that are told, it's by sort of European intrepid explorers. And that's part of this bigger question of colonialism as a whole, of the narrative of discovery, which has a tendency to assume either the absence of people from these spaces or, as we see in North Africa, sort of combination that the French assumed that indigenous people were not interested in this material. And another thing that becomes a very strong part of the French narrative of these materials is that it's part of this narrative, of this material is ours. So when the conquest of Algeria was launched, unlike perhaps in the case of Egypt, that there wasn't necessarily the understanding of the kinds of remains that we're going to be found when the French arrived in places like Algiers. But when they saw Roman material, it looked familiar to them and I discussed this at length in the book. But many of the officers that are part of the conquest came out of the École polytechnique They were trained in Latin, they were trained in cartography and they didn't have a very good visual map, aside from ancient sources about what it was they were going to find when they arrived there. So the narrative that they create is very much about the Romans, because they see themselves as following in the footsteps of the ancient Romans, of the Third Augustine Legion in particular, and the way in which they justify their vision of the conquest because it was not well planned in terms of what the future of this region was going to be. So, yes, my interpretation of these materials is based largely on the French one, because first of all, as a

French historian I was interested in the way that the French construct this narrative. But it was very difficult then to reconstruct what indigenous attitudes were towards these remains as early as the 1830’s or before the conquest period. I did try to the extent that was possible, but this is hard to do because the French, because they dominated this discourse and they were projecting it back to Metropolitan France. They weren't trying to convince to a large extent, and most of the stories that I was able to find in their accounts claimed that the indigenous people had no interest in this material and it was also similar, there was a similar narrative that they projected was that these sites had been abandoned or abused by indigenous people, and thus the French had the right to tell the story, that they were the new generation of the conquerors, that since they had been conquered themselves by the Romans, they had the right to this territory. And key to this argument were the inscriptions, which were in Latin, which allowed them to tell the story which they said was theirs. They said that the Arab conquest of North Africa had turned the indigenous people away from this material and thus it wasn't of interest, and they were sort of rightfully restoring North Africa from what they described as this period of piracy, you know, the barbary coast, that they were returning North Africa back to the fold of the Mediterranean, sort of initiating a new period of Roman or Roman descent domination which now the French saw themselves as the rightful inheritors. And this was also, you know, something that had a narrative that had been pushed by Napoleon as well, that you know, sort of a new empire was being established, North Africa would be a part of it and very soon they would make Algeria three different departments of France. So a part of the administrative structure which showed very clearly that they had no plans to make this a separate colony. But this essentially would be a part of France, and so the archeology fits in here and frankly, you know, you can see from the archaeological societies from this moment on that the indigenous people are not present there and they're being sort of consciously erased from that past. It's sort of like an intermediate period that doesn't matter at all. They sort of jump back to the Roman period. They look at the indigenous population, with the hopes this happens, maybe 40 or 50 years later, that eventually they would convert them and they would become truly French and Christian, which doesn't happen. But that this intermediary period doesn't matter right. It doesn't matter to them anyway. That they want to turn the clock back to the time of the Third Augustine Legion. And this is after the period of the work that I've done since then, is that they focus instead also on, and this is the case of christian missionaries who do archeology in the 1870’s and later, that they turn to the idea of and the period of Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine of Hippo becomes the foundation for this idea, that they're restoring Christianity to North Africa. They're not bringing it anew, and this is something that's aimed largely at the settler colonial population because of the lack of success they have in converting either the Arabs or the Berber population to Christianity.  Which is no great surprise given the nature of the conquest and and the way it transpire.

Gary: What is remarkable about the excavations in Algeria is how unprofessional they were in the 1830’s and decades later. You even make the point that during his Egyptian campaign 30 years earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte had a more professional core of researchers. Why were French forces in Algeria so initially inept when dealing with historic artifacts?

Bonnie: It's a really great question. I think there are a few different ways that we couldn't think about this. I mean, first I'll say that in the 1830’s archeology was an amateur undertaking wherever it was happening. There was no formal training that you could have in archaeology. It simply didn't exist. All the archaeologists were looking at at this period are either trained as architects. We're talking about military officers or in the case of some of the excavations we see happening in France, we see people who are simply excavating on their own land. You know they're digging things up. So in the 1830’s there's not a good sense of stratigraphy. There's not formal training in this area and it is largely fueled by enthusiasm. Now, in the case of when Napoleon goes to Egypt at the very end of the 18th century, he had an interest in egyptology or what would become egyptology? He was interested in the remains that he might find there, and so part of his enterprise was to bring along scholars, for instance linguist. Of course they couldn't read hieroglyphics yet that wouldn't happen until Champollion in the 1820’s. But they had an interest in bringing this material back again to France. Part of this idea of sort of imperial conquest that would be repeated over and over again. Part of the idea of conquest is to bring large remains, impressive remains back to your metropolitan capital to show the importance of where you've been and and where you're going and, and sort of, its associated with your status. If you look at, say, the British museum or the important museums in Berlin, all of these museums become part of that national narrative. Now, after Napoleon basically looted Egypt, he looted Rome. He brought these remains back to the Louvre. These would be put on display as part sort of a sign of his achievements and that of his regime. Now, in the case of the invasion of Algeria in 1830, this was not particularly well thought out and the objective there was not to bring in scholars at the beginning. I would say that the conquest has been shown by people working in this area, like Jennifer Sessions, for instance. This was sort of a last minute bid and six weeks later a new regime comes in right. So there's not a lot of planning and the scholars at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in Paris were pushing. They were like, well, we did this for Napoleon. We should have a delegation go south with us to form part of this, but because of the nature of the war, the Ministry of War did not want there to be a lot of civilians coming at the same time to Algeria, that there were massacres taking place. It's not until 1839 that they received permission to have a delegation that included scholars to go down to engage in this work. So it takes some time for this to happen and by the time they arrive a lot of material has already been destroyed and they are only allowed to stay a very short time because of the beginning of Bugeaud’s campaign in the Sahara, which also was something that the Ministry of War and the Governor General of Algeria did not want to get back to metropolitan France, because of the concern that there might be opposition in France if they actually knew what was going on in North Africa at this time. The civilian population in this period is relatively small and there were limits put on even when this group does manage to go down, but they're abruptly withdrawn again in the early 1840’s, so they don't have time to do that.  There's nothing similar to the Description de l’Égypte which is produced after Napoleon's conquest of Egypt. Even when the French don't have access to Egypt any longer, they're still producing more material that came out of those initial steps. The other thing I should mention too, though, is that what worked in the favor of doing archeology in this region is that officers did have access to their soldiers, who could do a lot of the heavy lifting that was necessary to undertake archeology in this region. But always competing with those archeological interests, which were largely driven by individual interest of officers who wanted to explore this further was the insistence that a lot of resources go towards the war and not be distracted by this archaeological question. And because these archaeological materials further the war effort, they could be used. Inscriptions, large blocks of stone could be used to build buildings, they could be used to pave roads, and so at the same time there's this interest, there's also the competing interests of the way in which archaeological material might serve military purposes as opposed to scholarly ones, and it was the military ones that usually won out. The other thing I'll mention, of course, is that it was much easier to ship antiquities out of Egypt because of the Nile than it was to move materials out of Algeria, especially as the the war effort moved past the coastal cities and moved inland. Because you're talking about moving heavy stone objects, you don't have well paved roads. These are very, very heavy. So in the 1830’s there were some ideas about, for instance, bringing triumphal arches back to France, but ultimately most of these were abandoned. The material that does ultimately make into France, there's not a huge amount of material that that comes back the way say compared to the Egyptian material, which a lot of it gets diverted to England because the defeat of the of the French navy. But it's much harder to bring the material back. And if you go to places like the Louvre where some of this material is present, you can see some of these pieces are heavily damaged and I think it's because of the way in which it was transported. The rail lines are significantly later and so the bits and pieces that make their way back have to be relatively transportable and the idea of bringing large remains back ultimately the French abandoned. It was simply not a high priority. It's not until the period of Napoleon III under the Second Empire who, Napoleon III was much more interested in Roman remains because of his own excavations within France, but he too, he's not willing to invest a huge amount of money into the archaeological efforts. So these remains are more sort of ad hoc, and ultimately what the French do is build museums within Algeria which are directed not at the indigenous population but at the colonial population, to teach them the same narrative that I was describing before. We’re the descendants of the Romans. We have the right to be here to give the new colonists coming from, not just from France, but various parts of the Mediterranean. There are a lot of Italian and Sicilian immigrants in this period into Algeria, but it's sort of to enculturate them to make them understand that that North Africa is a part of this same inheritance and that they have the right to be there.

Gary: A major theme of the book is violence, particularly by French forces against the indigenous populations. You've mentioned quite a bit of this, but especially focusing on perhaps the indigenous people. Can you explain how violence impacted archaeological work and historical writing?

Bonnie: Yeah, this was a very difficult, I have to say, in working on this project it was really an eye opener. I had worked on issues related to violence in the early medieval period earlier in my career, but that seemed a much greater remove then dealing with what I was reading in the archives. It was very, very difficult and also it was difficult for me to find a balance in the book, and this was something I was constantly weighing to make sure that I was not prioritizing the question of the remains over the fate of the indigenous people whose land was appropriated, whose livestock was taken, whose storehouses of grain and things were burnt, particularly the use by the French of what is known as the razzia. These were sort of punitive measures that were taken against these populations. The description of the murder of civilians very, very moving and very difficult to read. I did a lot of work in the military archives in France, in Vincennes where I would read the journals of the sort of expedition journals that were written by the same officers who were taking notes about the archaeological materials that they were seeing, and it was difficult for me to imagine how you could engage in a razzia and then, a day later, turn around and start digging things. For me it was sort of incomprehensible, but at the same time there are plenty of modern parallels that read about in the news. That could be likened to the way in which this kind of violence was applied and then erased. You see, by focusing on the early period, these officers, in a way we're able to sort of justify, I think, what they were doing during the daytime. You know sort of their, daytime versus, their daytime job as officers, which they were murdering people; versus the collection of materials that sort of furthered what it was they were interested in and that created the ideological framework for the conquest. Now this framework wasn't there in the beginning. What I noticed was it becomes more firmly cemented as time goes on. So one of the individuals I spent a lot of time working on was a man named Carbucchia, the colonel who was in charge of troops from the foreign legion, who was based in a military camp called Batna which is very close to the archeological site of Lambaesis, where he went on a regular basis to excavate. He actually got himself into some trouble for diverting military resources into his archeological efforts. The military authorities were not very happy he was doing that. But what's quite interesting is that or fascinating I guess you could say, or horrifying, was that at one point he was so angered that some local youths had defaced one of the inscriptions that he had collected, that that he actually said: if you don't turn over those young people to us, you know we're just going to destroy your village. So there are intersections, examples like that, where you see the violence intersect with the archaeology itself. But in many cases it's sort of strange, it's impossible for me to comprehend the way in which these things are compartmentalized. In other words the two things that they could write letters back about their finds and draw beautiful images of the remains of their finding. And yet, you know from their journals having to do with the expeditions that they had just unleashed unbelievable violence on the people they encountered. I think that the way they do it is that they, in a way they separate it. They say these were the Romans, these people who are here, they would claim, these are invaders, these are Arab invaders. We separate the two of them. And there are some exceptions in places like Lambaesis where they think they can see some of the indigenous people may be descendants of the Romans. These are all kinds of claims that they make, but in reality the archeology that’s fueling their effort, that's paying their paycheck. You know, many of the officers who engaged in archeology in North Africa would never do archeology again. They did so situationally. They had the resources to do it. It was something that passed the time. Maybe it distracted them from the kind of killing what they were doing. Some, a few of them, not very many, express their distress about attacking civilians and killing young children, but not many of them. So I think that the archeology becomes increasingly important, sort of psychologically, because it sort of gives justification for something. Maybe that seems rather pointless, because what they're encountering is not ancient Rome. They're encountering an area that the French decided relatively late in this process that they wanted to continue to inhabit and then later on engaged in all kinds of experiments for what might be grown in North Africa? What could what could Algeria provide to France? And it becomes a question of resource extraction.

Gary: Not long after the conquest came the colonization. How did the mass migration of French people to Algeria impact the Roman ruins?

Bonnie: So early on in the process there is not a lot of migration to the region. What you see at the very beginning are mostly the soldiers, thousands of them right. So within a decade the size of the army presence, the military presence in North Africa shifts from the range of 30,000 to 120,000 under the Governor General Bugeaud. So there's a very rapid expansion of the military in this period, the civilian presence, it takes time. In the beginning there's a small amount of civilian, and here I mean civilian European presence. It's relatively limited because they don't have the, they're taking resources from indigenous villages, but there's a limit on how many people they can support. And the supply chain, which is through Toulon in the South of France, is bringing supplies for the military. And the other thing to keep in mind is the very, very high level of disease among the Europeans. When they get to North Africa. They're dying of cholera. Far more Europeans die of disease than they do from the military engagements they are participating in . So I think there's some reluctance at the beginning to have a large civilian population, but this begins to change. The French begin to experiment with, for instance, creating farms, to think about what the civilian presence might do. But there is some reluctance of the French population to come, and I think this is in part why you see a much broader influx of population from places like Italy or Sicily, Sardinia, other places in the Mediterranean, also from the Greek migrants to the area. But they get sort of classed as European and ultimately the idea is that they have a greater chance of becoming French. So in the early phase it's quite different than, say post 1848. That's when North Africa becomes a part of, becomes a part of France, of the three districts in Algeria get incorporated into France. And also you see efforts by the government, particularly in the period of 1848. This happens again in 1870. To take, for instance, people in 1870 are fleeing Alsace-Lorraine when is taken over by the Germans. At this point, the French government says well, we'll move people to North Africa. We can resettle them there. They were farmers there, they can be farmers in North Africa. That usually didn't pan out. And in 1848 actually the French have the idea we could take some of the people, this happens again in 1852 when Napoleon III is trying to get rid of people who are critical of the coup d’état and the creation of the empire. So you see Algeria used as, in essence, a prison for some of the people who are considered undesirable that are causing too much trouble in France. So the idea later they would be shipped off to the Pacific. But at this point places like Lambaesis, which is actually an archeological site, gets turned into a prison camp. So using remains from the archeological site to build the prison that's still there today. This influx, so first of all, I would say the military itself has a very negative impact, as I have already mentioned on the state of archeological remains, of Roman remains in this period, that the Roman military destroys a large number of sites and uses this material in its new structures. But the civilian population also begins to cause a lot of damage to these sites because they want to establish properties in these places, or they're interested in doing their own little excavations at these sites. So as the civilian population increases, not only is this land confiscated from more and more of the indigenous population, but it also has an impact on the remains. With the creation of these archaeological societies in North Africa in the, especially from the 1850’s, you see local colonists doing their own excavations of putting these materials into museums. There is competition between the museum that's established in Algiers with those placed by Constantine who has a lot more local archaeological material than Algiers does, at least dating from the Roman period. And so you also see the movement of materials, and sometimes we can't identify where things originally came from. In the 1850's we also see somebody named 34:28 Ernest Renier who comes, catalogues materials that he's finding, particularly inscriptions, and by the 1870’s most of those have been destroyed. So the civilian and the military presence have a huge, huge impact on the survival of archaeological material. And of course some material is being taken back to France, mostly to Paris, but not exclusively so. So yeah, I would say, the civilian presence and the increase in migration to the region has largely negative impact on these remains, although it does produce a few studies of them. But even within the lifetime of those who wrote these studies, a lot of these remains have already been destroyed.

Gary: Perhaps not a theme, but ever-present in the work is irony. At one point you mentioned how the French army sought to protect Roman ruins from the destruction of artifacts by incoming French citizens, by sending the pieces back to France for preservation. In another instance, you note how French officers simultaneously claimed that indigenous peoples were ignorant of Roman ruins and their significance, yet they often relied on indigenous peoples for information on the ruins. Finally, the French nation increasingly sought to civilize Algeria by making it more French, to the point that Algeria even became a part of France Proper, not a colony. Simultaneously. French officials deported failed revolutionaries to Algeria because it was so far removed from France. Did colonizing policy-makers ever recognize these contradictions and how did they deal with them?

Bonnie: Yeah, that's an interesting question and a very big one. It's hard to think about how to address this question. I think in part what you see happening is the logic of colonization that anything goes if you can convince enough people of that narrative. So let me think about a way in which I can explain that a little bit better. But as I mentioned before, the French are largely writing to other French. During the period described in my book the French really try to prevent people of competing countries, particularly the English and later in 1870 the German from coming into Algeria and seeing what they've done. So that's one of the few places in which you can see this narrative disrupted. So, one of the things that I found, which is quite interesting, is that at a certain point the French aren't only interested in Roman remains, but they also begin to talk about prehistoric remains, standing stones. So in those cases, and this is in the late 1850’s or so, there are some French scholars who even begin to claim that these standing stones were built by the Celts. That these are gallic standing stones, and this also shows that not only was it because of the Romans, but because the ancient Gauls must have been in North Africa as well, which is kind of preposterous. Yet, in the case of these arguments, the field of pre-history in this period is also sort of just beginning, and I mean the French, become a laughing stock for making, or at least the scholars who made that argument become a laughing stock because they're saying, well, they're standing stones in Sweden. Are you going to claim Sweden as being founded by the Gauls as well? So when there was an international audience, it became much more difficult to press the kinds of claims that the French were quite willing to do for the Roman period, which they were basically making the case to other French. This though, becomes disrupted in the 1870’s. So there was a very large project called the CIL, which was a project that was initiated from Berlin, that was about the cataloging of Roman inscriptions and, of course, at the period in which this was undertaken in the late 1860’s and then in the early 1870’s, things changed quite radically because of the Franco-Prussian war. Whereas in the beginning, scholars like Renier who had studied the inscriptions back in the 1850’s was willing to collaborate with Berlin. After 1870 this goodwill obviously disappeared and the Germans wanted to send their own representative to North Africa to study these remains, and in fact they succeeded in doing so only after some pressing, because the French were quite territorial and protective of this territory being theirs and not allowing German scholars to so-called colonize an area which they saw as belonging to them. And so because the Germans were very, very critical of what the French had done and the level of destruction seen in Algeria couldn't really be paralleled with other areas in which these kinds of excavations have been undertaken. Because the war was so violent and the destruction so massive that there was great embarrassment. The French didn't want it to be exposed, the fact that of all these inscriptions that Renier catalogued, thousands of them with the help of some of the officers, that most of them were gone, they didn't exist anymore. They were dependent on, his notes to understand what had been there and what was there no longer in places, for instance like Lambaesis and later, for instance at Timgad. So, I think that's part of what enabled the contradiction was by limiting the news that went from Algeria back, especially in the period of the 1830’s and 1840’s, that the Ministry of War was able to sort of keep an handle on those contradictions and they were able to dictate the terms. The indigenous population was really not in a position to challenge, and I think maybe the monuments were the least of their worries. It was about survival, and so the French could keep these inherent contradictions and also to change the narrative when it became productive to do so. And this is what I've seen, especially since completing the book, was that in the 1880’s that the narrative, for instance, many of the archeologists in that period are missionaries, and so they changed the narrative. So for them far more important than the Third Augustinian Legion was the period of Saint Augustine. And for them it was a story of Christianity rather than a story of imperial conquest. So, they could dictate the terms, and these changed over time, and this becomes really really important in understanding these contradictions I think. It was very valuable, but only certain parties have the right to change that narrative.

Gary: Even as the nation of France colonized Algeria, it underwent dramatic changes at home. In 1830, during the initial invasion, Frances Bourbon monarchy fell and was replaced with the July Monarchy. That same year, in 1848, Louis-Philippe's regime ended and the second republic came to power. Within four years, the second empire was established. How did upheaval in France impact Algerian colonization and the archaeological work?

Bonnie: So, I think it's helpful to keep in mind that the policies related to the conquest and also what was happening on-the-ground in Algeria was never monolithic. What I observed in the archives, as there were different levels on which decisions were being made and very important, of course, was the monarch, but the monarch was not really in charge of what was happening. Far more important was what was happening in the Ministry of War. And who was in charge of that effort, and particularly in Algeria, who was the governor general, who was making decisions that occurred there, and then even below that, was what decisions individual officers were making about how to spend their time and how they were going to allot their resources. So what you see happening is often the Ministry of War, there’s tension with the Ministry of War and the Governor General. There's also tension between the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Public Instruction, and also what's happening with the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, there's tension there as well. So what often happens on-the-ground is quite different from what they're imagining in Metropolitan France and often what the Governor General wants to happen. So in the 1840’s for instance, Bugeaud is furious that archeological undertakings are happening on his watch because he wants his resources in the Sahara. This is a distraction. The Ministry of War is kind of contending with, you know, the Ministry of Public Instruction, in the Ministry of the Interior. Who may be more interested in the fate of the archeological artifacts than he is? So as we see these regime changes, it does have an impact on the kind of resources that go into Algeria and the way this is envisioned. But especially in the 1830’s and 1840’s, I would say that it's the Governor General, it's the Armée d’Afrique The French army was known in this period that dictate a lot of the terms that are happening back to what's happening, in part by subterfuge, by not sort of explaining exactly what's happening on-the-ground we can see this, for instance, with the massacres that happen at Dahra. It takes some time for this information to be relaid back to metropolitan France, and they certainly don't want politicians to know what's happening on-the-ground because the public opinion turns against this. The same kinds of resources that are going into North Africa might not make it there. So you do see under Napoleon III, greater interest in what's happening in terms of archeology, putting more resources into this material. But you know Napoleon III, had many things happening at the same time, I would say it's certainly far less important to him than like the sites that he's interested in France, like Alesia, and his interest in Julius Caesar, is more important than what's happening on-the-ground in Algeria in terms of archaeological remains. But it is important, and this is why I organized the book chronologically, is to think about how these policies changed. I roughly did it sort of decade by decade? Because you could see that the way in which the emphasis change, the narrative changes, the kinds of resources change. Previous to this is the creation of archaeological societies and museums in the 1850’s. Then you begin also then to have colonial settlers have an opinion about this. So, I would say that the changes that happen in France do have an impact, but it's somewhat removed from what increasingly is happening on-the-ground and the way in which these remains are being treated.

Gary: What were the long-lasting impacts of french archaeological works in colonial Algeria and how have those impacted the two countries today?

Bonnie: This is a very difficult question and I'm not, you know, a specialist necessarily in modern sort of relations between France and Algeria. But what I can tell you is that that, especially after the Algerian revolution, that there was, in essence, the structures that we're supporting Roman archeology were linked to metropolitan France. So, from the 1960’s they are tainted and they're associated with colonial presence and colonial narratives and colonial violence. So the problem being is in Algeria, what then do you do with those remains today? Right? So some of them were exported to Metropolitan France, but not a large number. I'm not aware, and I could be wrong about negotiations for repatriation of these antiquities to Algeria. I think that's of less interest than what happens to those remains in Algeria today. The difficulty is that the French were so successful in convincing people that these were French remains, that following the revolution, people still look at these things the Roman material is being associated with French imperialism and French colonialism and a period of rapaciousness. And so if you compare, for instance, the remains in places like Tunisia which also have French presents from the 1880’s but which had less impact and was not, was a violent takeover but not nearly as violent as what happened in Algeria. There seems to be a bit more receptiveness to the fate of these Roman remains and also because in Tunisia there was also the excavation of Punic remains, which people identify, this is from the Carthaginian period, much more closely that they can say in a way that these are our remains. In the same way that you say see in Egypt, where there is an association with the pre-Islamic past, with an identification and great pride. If we can see the intention that the Egyptian government is giving to Egyptology, the Egyptian past and the pride that's taken in those materials today. Algeria does not have, say the same level of tourism than say we see either Tunisia or Morocco or certainly Egypt, and there's a great deal of ambivalence towards this Roman past. And I would say, with this project I think there's a lot less knowledge among Algerians of what the French did with these remains and how important this was. This is in part why I'm so excited that the National Endowment for Humanities has sponsored, has made it possible for my book to be released in the next few months as open access, because my hope is that people in Algeria will become more familiar with this history of the use of archaeology for ideological purposes and also perhaps be able to reclaim some of these remains, part of their heritage and not part of the heritage of France. So it's a very, there's a lot of tension in this question and in terms of what will happen to these archaeological remains within Algeria. I think this is an ongoing question about where resources for the national patrimony of Algeria should be spent. Of course, the French didn't give a lot of attention to the structures that were built-in the Arab period, and this is obviously something that is part of the Algerian patrimony as well. So, I would say that the Roman materials are not viewed very positively. The concern is just what what will happen to these Roman remains, what is happening to them right now if they are not a priority of the Algerian government.

Gary: The book is Incidental Archeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa. Thank you very much for being on the show.

Bonnie: Thank you. It was my pleasure.