Walking through the limestone-paved streets of Timgad’s northeastern quarter in the second century CE, you would have encountered a sensory landscape coming from inside people’s homes: the rhythmic pounding of fullers’ feet treading cloth in their stalls, the sharp yet distinct smell of urine used in the cleaning process to break down the oils in wool, warm steam rising from the heated basins, and the slap of water in the stations where cloth was rinsed.
These were not refined peristyle gardens frozen in time. They were working homes, where the boundaries between domestic life and economic production dissolved into a textured daily existence that will feel more familiar to anyone who has worked from home than to anyone who has read Vitruvius.
Productive domesticity
The houses at Timgad are distinctive in their own unique way, with workshops for cloth-finishing—fullonicae—built directly into residential insulae, olive presses standing in household courtyards, and even bronze foundries and pottery workshops opening out onto residential streets at the city’s edge. This integration of economic activity into domestic space is not an incidental feature. It is the condition of life for a substantial share of the city’s inhabitants.
This project rejects the assumption inherited from Vitruvian and post-Pompeian scholarship that workshops inside homes should be viewed as a corruption of an “ideal” Roman house. Instead, productive domesticity should be viewed as a legitimate mode of living, not a deviation from one. It makes different demands on the rhythms of family life, on the sensory environment, and on how identity is performed across thresholds. Reading Timgad’s houses from this premise changes what counts as evidence.
There is a contemporary edge to this. Anyone who fit a desk into the corner of a kitchen during the pandemic, or kept their workday running out of a bedroom long after, has reasons to be sceptical of the idea that homes with workshops in them are corruptions of real homes. Timgad’s inhabitants worked through their own version of the question eighteen centuries ago, and the architecture of their houses is the record of how they answered it. That record deserves more than archaeological attention. It is proof that the question of how a single house can hold both work and home is not new to modernity, and the answers people found long before us are still worth reading today.
Around a hundred houses
Timgad preserves roughly one hundred excavated houses, among the largest single-site assemblages of excavated domestic architecture in Roman North Africa. Despite that, only a handful have received meaningful modern analysis. That gap is a big part of why this project even exists.
Most of what we can read about these houses lives in three kinds of evidence. First, archaeological documentation, from the French excavation reports beginning in the 1880s through Germain’s 1969 catalog and more recent analytical work by Rebuffat, Amraoui, and Ardeleanu. Second, epigraphic evidence, especially the foundation inscription of the colony and the civic inscriptions that fix the households in a social world of named local elites. Third, literary sources like Procopius, Apuleius, and the North African church fathers Tertullian and Augustine, useful for context, thin on domestic specifics.
Each kind of evidence carries its own distortions, and each is being read here alongside the others. The Methods page lays out how.
Why this matters now
The question of how homes shape the people who live in them is not only a question about antiquity. Anyone who worked from home during the pandemic knows what it feels like when domestic life, economic production, and social identity all happen in the same rooms. Timgad’s inhabitants lived something similar eighteen centuries ago, and the shape of their houses both responded to those pressures and shaped how they answered them. Paying attention to these houses is a way of paying attention to how people, then and now, negotiate belonging, labor, and home under the constraints they are given.
What to read next
For the city that holds these houses, see the Timgad page. For the analytical tools this project uses, see Methods. Individual case studies will appear here as they are completed.
Further reading
A working bibliography on Roman and ancient houses, domestic space, and North African domestic architecture. These are the works this project reads alongside, draws from, and argues with.
Allison, Penelope. 1993. "How Do We Identify the Use of Space in Roman Housing?" In Functional and Spatial Analysis of Wall Painting, edited by E. Moormann, 1–8. Leiden: Babesch.
Daniels, R. 1995. "Punic Influence in the Domestic Architecture of Roman Volubilis (Morocco)." Oxford Journal of Archaeology 14 (1): 79–95.
Grahame, M. 2000. Reading Space: Social Interaction and Identity in the Houses of Roman Pompeii. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Hanson, J. 2003. Decoding Homes and Houses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nevett, L. 1999. House and Society in the Ancient Greek World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Platts, H. 2019. Multisensory Living in Ancient Rome: Power and Space in Roman Houses. London: Bloomsbury.
Rebuffat, René. 1969. "Maisons à péristyle d'Afrique du Nord I." Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire 81 (2): 657–705.
———. 1974. "Maisons à péristyle d'Afrique du Nord. Répertoire de plans publiés (II)." Mélanges de l'École française de Rome. Antiquité 86 (1): 445–499.
Scott, Eleanor. 1997. The Archaeology of Roman Domestic Space. London: Routledge.
Thébert, Yvon. 1987. "Private Life and Domestic Architecture in Roman Africa." In A History of Private Life, vol. 1, edited by P. Veyne, 319–409. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Wallace-Hadrill, A. 1994. Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wilson, R. J. A. 2003. "Domestic Architecture and Identity in Roman Africa." In Romanization and the City: Creation, Transformations, and Failures, edited by Elizabeth Fentress, 209–212. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology.
Wilson, R. J. A. 2016. "Roman Villas in North Africa." In The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, edited by Walter Scheidel, 266–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.