Recipient Dr. Andrew Dufton
Date 01 February, 2021
Amount £800 (Travel Grant)
Summary The centuries from the Roman conquest to the end of the Severan Dynasty are often portrayed as a time of increasing urbanisation within North Africa, a period during which even the smallest towns adopted the monuments we associate with ancient Rome. A tendency within the scholarship to focus on well-trodden dichotomies between Romanization and resistance, urban continuity or drastic change, has limited our appreciation of the social implications of a shift in colonial power. My research adopts a paradigm of competing and complementary urban processes to parse the evidence presented by historical and archaeological sources. This project focusses on a specific cycle of urban change—decay and renewal. Regional data for city origins and administrative status are compared to detailed urban biographies of individual cities and examples of neighbourhood-level regeneration efforts drawn from past excavation reports. The proposed travel introduces an essential in-person analysis of the architectural changes described in published materials.