native Celts and/or Gauls had intermarried with the Romans and also learned
from them the beneWts of civilization. In contrast, archaeologists working in
North Africa agreed that even under Roman rule the rural native popula-
tion—the Berbers—were passive and had opposed all possibilities of gaining
advantages from the higher culture brought to them. This had impeded racial
mixture (Mattingly 1996: 56).
In the 1870s the character of archaeology in North Africa changed.
In accordance with the transformations in the character of imperialism,
archaeology became more professional, reinforcing the colonial institutional
base, and backing them up with speciWc legislation for antiquities. There
were even thoughts of opening a French Archaeological Institute in Tunisia,
but, eventually, the plans came to nothing. Instead, Algeria and Tunisia
remained under the remit of the French School in Rome of 1873, the epigraphy
of North Africa becoming one of the most prestigiousWelds of study in it.
Institutionalization came a decade later, when oYces for the administration of
archaeology were created in both Algeria and Tunisia. TheWrst was the Service
de monuments historiques de l’Alge ́rie (Service of Historical Monuments)
organized in Algiers in 1880, which had as one of its main tasks the control of
all archaeological excavations. The Service was headed by one of Viollet-le-
Duc’s disciples, Edmond Duthoit (1840–80), substituted in 1889 by another
architect, Albert Ballu (1849–1939). When Tunisia was transformed into a
French protectorate in 1881 a Commission of North Africa (Commission de
l’Afrique du Nord) was created. A committee within the commission, the
Committee for Historical Studies, dealt with archaeology, publishing the
Bulletin arche ́ologique. In 1885, a Service of Antiquities (Service des antiquite ́s
tunisiennes) was set up in Tunisia. From 1908, it had a periodical publication,
Notes et Documents. Later, in the twentieth century, immediately after the
conversion of most of Morocco into a French protectorate in 1912, a Service of
Antiquities, Fine Arts, and Historical Monuments was established (Wright
1997: 328), the Junta Central de Monumentos (Central Service of Monu-
ments) serving as its Spanish counterpart (Gozalbes Cravioto forthcoming).
Legislation also reXected the importance attached to archaeology in the
North African colonies. In Tunisia, legislation protecting antiquities was
promulgated in the decrees of 26 September 1890 and 2 August 1896 (Prados
Martı ́nez 2000: 305n). After the First World War, there would be new an-
tiquities legislation in Tunisia and Algeria in 1920 and 1925 respectively. It is
worth pointing out that, as was the case with certain aspects of the institu-
tionalization of archaeology in India (Chapter 8), these measures were imple-
mented before similar ones in the metropolis. Similar legislation would not be
introduced in France until 1941–2 (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 388). A possible
explanation for this phenomenon—the introduction of measures of heritage
Russian Empire and French North Africa 269