Morocco was put under international control in the same year. Libya was
invaded by Italy in 1911 and MoroccoWnally succumbed to France and Spain
in 1912 (Cherif 1989; Ivanov 1989: 513).
In the newly acquired territories in North Africa, French scholars put
science into the service of the state. Archaeology was perceived as an import-
ant component in the new hegemonic knowledge which was being created, a
type of knowledge perceived as superior. At the start of the nineteenth century
the oldest remains admitted as such in the Maghreb were those of the
Phoenician, Punic, and Roman periods. The Berber populations still living
in the area were seen as the descendants of the original inhabitants living in
the area at the time of the Roman conquest. The Arabs had arrived in the
seventh centuryceand had been accepted relatively peacefully because of
local communities’ dissatisfaction with Byzantine taxation. In the long term,
however, the Arab invasion had destroyed, or greatly altered, the remaining
signs of the classical culture. This Berber and the Arab past, however, would
be highly disregarded in the historical discourse created by archaeologists,
who instead centred their interest on the classical and pre-Arab Christian
period. This selection became the hegemony for a hundred years, although, as
will be discussed next, it also experienced changes. Three main phases can be
distinguished in how archaeological remains were dealt with: archaeology
before the start of European colonialism of the area, the colonial period until
the 1870s and,Wnally, the period after 1870.
Classical antiquities in French Algeria and Tunisia before the 1870sBefore the French occupation, the archaeology of the classical Great Civiliza-
tions that so fascinated European archaeologists (Chapters 1 to 5) would also
become the focus of attention for antiquarians working in North Africa. To
begin with, archaeological enquiries were linked to the discovery of the past
civilizations perceived as the earliest echelons in the Western advance towards
supremacy. For this research to be seen as successful it had to be materialized
in physical objects, considered as metaphors of the past itself. The appropri-
ation of archaeological pieces that represented the development towards
Western civilization had as its purpose to display them in the large European
museums for the beneWt of public education. Early attention concentrated on
Carthage located in today’s Tunisia. The ruins of the old Punic capital faced a
situation that was to a certain extent similar to that experienced in Egypt
(Chapter 6), where the consuls conducted excavations both as an intellectual
enterprise and as an economic pursuit. In the 1830s the Bey of Tunis granted
permission to excavate CarthageWrst to the British consul-general Sir Thomas
264 Colonial Archaeology