Every claim this project makes about Timgad rests on a set of methods, and each method carries its own assumptions. This page is the short version of what those methods are, why they were chosen, and whose work they draw on.
Space syntax
Space syntax is a family of techniques for turning a building plan into something that can be analyzed mathematically. Four moves matter most here:
- Redrawing plans from the original excavation reports converts the architectural remains into clean, analyzable spatial units, with each room, corridor, and courtyard as its own node.
- Justified access graphs reveal the spatial hierarchy of a house by showing how deep each space sits from the street entrance. A room one step in is experienced differently than a room four steps in.
- Step depth measures how many spaces a user passes through to reach any given point. It is a proxy for how visible, private, or controlled a space is.
- Visibility graphs map what can be seen from each location inside a house. Sight lines do social work. Who can see whom, and from where, structures how people encounter each other in a space.
Space syntax does not tell us what happened inside a room. It tells us what the architecture made easy, hard, likely, or impossible.
Fisher, Kevin. 2023. Monumentality, Place-making and Social Interaction on Late Bronze Age Cyprus. Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology 17. London: Equinox Press.
Hillier, Bill, and Julienne Hanson. 1984. The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rapoport, Amos. 1990. The Meaning of the Built Environment. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Habitus and discrepant identities
Space syntax gets refined into something about lived experience by two theoretical frames.
Habitus, from Pierre Bourdieu, is the idea that daily movement through space produces embodied social dispositions. The way you walk through your own home is not a set of decisions you make every day. It is something your body has already learned. The architecture teaches it, and the teaching continues whether the people inside are paying attention or not.
Discrepant identities, from David Mattingly, is the recognition that provincial inhabitants of the Roman empire held multiple, context-dependent identities at once. A Timgad resident could be a veteran, a householder, a Numidian by family, and a participant in Roman civic life, all in the same afternoon, and could move between those positions by moving between the rooms of their house. Identity in the provinces was not a binary of Roman or not-Roman. It was layered and situational.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mattingly, David J. 2011. Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Woolf, Greg. 1998. Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A decolonizing approach to colonial-era sources
Most of the evidence base for Timgad’s houses comes from French excavation reports published between the 1880s and the 1950s. Those reports are indispensable. They are also artifacts of the moment they were made, written by excavators who saw themselves as inheritors of Rome’s “civilizing mission” in North Africa.
Reading them responsibly means three things. First, we use them carefully and credit them, including when their findings hold up. Second, we note their biases as part of the method, not as a footnote. Third, we look for what they did not record, and where possible we fill those silences with archival materials, comparative evidence from nearby sites, and direct observation on the ground.
The goal is not to throw out the excavation record. It is to read it with open eyes.
Gosden, Chris. 2004. Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yelles, Anissa. 2024. "Timgad et les archives de fouilles: Relectures et perspectives." In Rome, archéologie et histoire urbaine: trente ans après l'Urbs (1987), edited by C. Courrier, M. Tarpin, A. Vanel, and N. Tran, 485–508. Rome: École Française de Rome.
Household archaeology
Household archaeology, the subdiscipline that asks how houses worked as social and economic units rather than simply as buildings, is the broader conversation this project takes part in. Most of its foundational work was built on the remarkably preserved houses of Roman Italy, with Pompeii and Herculaneum at the center. This project draws on those tools carefully, using the field’s insights while pushing back on its Pompeian defaults and widening the frame to North Africa, where the houses tell a different story.
Thébert, Yvon. 1987. "Private Life and Domestic Architecture in Roman Africa." In A History of Private Life, Vol. 1, edited by Paul Veyne, 319–409. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. 1994. Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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.
What this method is not
This project is not trying to determine whether any given house is Roman, Punic, or Numidian. That question, as framed, is the problem, not the answer. The more useful question, and the one this method supports, is how spatial organization structured social relationships and made some practices easier or harder for the people inside. That is a question about houses as active agents in the making of provincial life, and that is the question this project is built to answer.