This page is the project’s public reading list. It collects the works that shape how the houses of Timgad are read here, from the colonial-era excavation reports that produced the physical record to the theoretical frames that let us read that record critically. Entries are grouped by the four questions this project lives inside: how Roman North Africa has been studied, how the colonial archive was built, how identity and domestic life intersect, and how space carries meaning.
Where a work is a core source for this project, a short italicized note follows the citation. All entries are in Chicago author-date format. A more detailed internal record, including page-level notes on the houses each source mentions, lives in the project’s literature-review database and will be released at a later time.
Roman North Africa and Timgad · Colonial-era excavation and its sources · Habitus, identity, and discrepant experience · Space syntax and household archaeology
Roman North Africa and Timgad
The regional frame and the Timgad-specific scholarship belong together here. North African houses have long been read in the shadows of Vitruvius and Pompeii, measured against metropolitan Italian ideals and, when they fell short of those ideals, dismissed as incomplete or “irregular” versions of a supposedly more Roman original. The last two decades have started to undo that inheritance. Scholars like Amraoui, Dufton, McCarty, and Yelles have turned back toward the Maghreb on its own terms, reading Timgad as what it actually was: a well-documented, economically active, locally-lived-in city during the so-called “African boom,” not a colonial curiosity at the edge of the empire. These are the works that place Timgad inside the wider Roman world, and this project inside the revival of Maghrebi archaeology.
Core Wilson, Andrew. 2001. "Timgad and Textile Production." In Economies Beyond Agriculture in the Classical World, edited by David J. Mattingly and John Salmon, 271–296. London: Routledge. Wilson's count of more than twenty fullonicae, twice the number attested at Pompeii, reframes the city as a working town, not a monumental showpiece.
Core Amraoui, Touatia. 2020. "Crafts in Roman North Africa: Some Examples of Technical Transfer and Permanence through Grain Mills and Fullonicae." In Mobile Technologies in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond, edited by Chloë N. Duckworth, Aurélie Cuénod, and David J. Mattingly, 115–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Amraoui's body of work, and this synthesis in particular, is where productive domesticity in the Maghreb gets its modern baseline. She also revises Wilson's fullonica count downward under tighter identification criteria, an exemplary case of the field correcting itself.
Core Dufton, J. Andrew. 2019. "The Architectural and Social Dynamics of Gentrification in Roman North Africa." American Journal of Archaeology 123 (2): 263–290. Reads wall-rebuild sequences across multiple North African cities as evidence of elite displacement of smaller households over the second and third centuries. Methodologically sympathetic to what this project is trying to do for Timgad specifically.
Amraoui, Touatia. 2011. "Le quartier industriel de Timgad: un état de la question." In La ville au quotidien: regards croisés sur l'habitat et l'artisanat, edited by Souen Fontaine, Stéphanie Sartre, and Amel Tekki, 223–232. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence.
Amraoui, Touatia. 2017. L'artisanat dans les cités antiques de l'Algérie (Ier siècle avant notre ère – VIIe siècle après notre ère). Archaeopress Roman Archaeology 26. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Amraoui, Touatia. 2020. "The Archaeology of Urban Workshops in the Roman Maghreb." In Urban Space and Urban History in the Roman World, edited by Miko Flohr, 221–240. London: Routledge.
Benton, Jared. 2020. "The Bakeries of Volubilis: Process, Space, and Interconnectivity." Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada 17 (2): 241–272.
Benton, Jared, Christy Schirmer, Ruth Pelling, Sarah Bulger, Drew Messing, and Ireland O'Hare. 2023. "The Bakery in the Maison à la Citerne at Volubilis." Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada 20 (2): 121–155.
Blanchard-Lemée, Michèle. 1998. "Dans les jardins de Djemila." Antiquités africaines 34: 185–197.
Bouchareb, Abdelouahab. 2009. "Timgad: renouveau urbain, nouvelle urbanité (à partir du IIe s.)." Réflexion(s), September 2009. Université Mentouri de Constantine.
Briand-Ponsart, Claude. 1999. "Quelques remarques à propos des fondations privées en Afrique du Nord romaine (Ier–IIIe s. ap. J.-C.)." In L'Afrique du Nord antique: cultures et paysages. Actes du colloque de Nantes (mai 1996), 87–110. Besançon: Institut des Sciences et Techniques de l'Antiquité.
Bullo, Silvia, Francesca Ghedini, and Paola Zanovello, eds. 2003. Amplissimae atque ornatissimae domus (Aug., civ., II, 20, 26): l'edilizia residenziale nelle città della Tunisia romana. 2 vols. Antenor Quaderni 2.1–2.2. Rome: Quasar.
Daniels, Robert. 1995. "Punic Influence in the Domestic Architecture of Roman Volubilis (Morocco)." Oxford Journal of Archaeology 14 (1): 79–96.
Droß-Krüpe, Kerstin. 2016. "Spatial Concentration and Dispersal of Roman Textile Crafts." In Urban Craftsmen and Traders in the Roman World, edited by Miko Flohr and Andrew Wilson, 334–351. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellis, Simon P. 1988. "The End of the Roman House." American Journal of Archaeology 92 (4): 565–576.
Fentress, Elizabeth. 2020. "Sacred Transactions: Religion and Markets in Roman Urbanism." In Urban Space and Urban History in the Roman World, edited by Miko Flohr, 179–197. London: Routledge.
Fentress, Elizabeth. 2022. "If These Walls Could Talk: Reflections on Houses and Identity." In The Language of the Urban Domestic Architecture as an Expression of Identity in the Roman World, edited by Álvaro Corrales Álvarez, 215–225. MYTRA 11. Mérida: Instituto de Arqueología de Mérida (CSIC).
Flohr, Miko, ed. 2020. Urban Space and Urban History in the Roman World. London: Routledge.
Flohr, Miko, and Arjan Zuiderhoek, eds. 2024. A Companion to Cities in the Greco-Roman World. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hobson, Matthew S. 2015. The North African Boom: Evaluating Economic Growth in the Roman Province of Africa Proconsularis (146 B.C.–A.D. 439). Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 100. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology.
Jacques, François. 1992. "Propriétés impériales et cités en Numidie méridionale." Cahiers du Centre Gustave Glotz 3: 123–139.
Kherrour, Louardi, Sofiane Hattab, and Mohamed A. Rezzaz. 2020. "Archaeological Sites and Tourism: Protection and Valorization, Case of Timgad (Batna) Algeria." GeoJournal of Tourism and Geosites 28 (1): 289–302.
Laghmouche, Boubakar, Dalila Houglaouène, and Meriem Naimi Ait-Aoudia. 2024. "Urban Changes in Late Roman North African Cities: Thamugadi (Timgad, Algeria) as a Case Study." In Innovative Approaches to Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Urban Development: Integrating Tradition and Modernity, edited by Hourakhsh Ahmad Nia and Rokhsaneh Rahbarianyazd. Istanbul: Cinius Yayınları.
Leone, Anna. 2007. Changing Townscapes in North Africa from Late Antiquity to the Arab Conquest. Munera 28. Bari: Edipuglia.
Leveau, Philippe. 1978. "La situation coloniale de l'Afrique romaine." Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 33 (1): 89–92.
Malek, Amina-Aïcha. 1999. "Le sentiment de la nature dans les domus de l'Afrique romaine, IIᵉ–Vᵉ siècles." PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).
McCarty, Matthew M. 2022. "Reforesting Roman Africa: Woodland Resources, Worship, and Colonial Erasures." The Journal of Roman Studies 112: 105–141. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075435822000338.
Miller, Shulamit, Yuli Gekht, S. Rebecca Martin, Sveta Matskevich, and Ilan Sharon. 2024. "The Houses of Hellenistic–Roman Tel Dor: A Study of Domestic Social Practices and Economic Activities." Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 12 (2): 115–149.
Monteix, Nicolas. 2016. "Contextualizing the Operational Sequence: Pompeian Bakeries as a Case Study." In Urban Craftsmen and Traders in the Roman World, edited by Andrew Wilson and Miko Flohr, 153–182. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pavis d'Escurac, Henriette. 1980. "Flaminat et société dans la colonie de Timgad." Antiquités africaines 15: 183–200.
Quinn, Josephine Crawley. 2003. "Roman Africa?" In 'Romanization'? Digressus Supplement 1, edited by Andrew Merryweather and Jonathan Prag, 7–34.
Rezkallah, Younès. 2020. "Le SIG des fouilles de l'antique Thamugadi: premiers résultats." AOURAS 10: 355–369.
Stone, David L. 1998. "Culture and Investment in the Rural Landscape: The North African bonus agricola." Antiquités africaines 34: 103–113.
Wilson, Andrew. 2002. "Urban Production in the Roman World: The View from North Africa." Papers of the British School at Rome 70: 231–273.
Wilson, R. J. A. 2018. "Roman Villas in North Africa." In The Roman Villa in the Mediterranean Basin: Late Republic to Late Antiquity, edited by Annalisa Marzano and Guy P. R. Métraux, 266–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wuilleumier, Pierre. 1928. "Mobilier de l'Afrique romaine." Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire 45: 123–149.
Colonial-era excavation and its sources
The Timgad studied today is the Timgad that Albert Ballu and his teams uncovered between 1881 and 1926, extended by Marcel Christofle from 1927 to 1936, Louis Leschi in the late 1940s, and Christian Courtois in 1951. Their reports are in many cases the only path back to walls that have since collapsed or been modified. They are also documents of their own moment, records produced inside a colonial project and in the service of it. The project depends on these sources and reads them critically, with Yelles 2024 and Gosden 2004 pointing the way. The Timeline of Excavation page is the chronological companion to this section.
Core Ballu, Albert. 1897. Les ruines de Timgad (antique Thamugadi). Paris: Ernest Leroux. The founding architectural record. Ballu's plans, however idealized, are the reference every later reconstruction still checks itself against.
Core Boeswillwald, Émile, René Cagnat, and Albert Ballu. 1905. Timgad, une cité africaine sous l'Empire romain. Paris: Leroux. The synthesis that fixed the wider scholarly image of Timgad. Its framing (monumental civic center, hinted-at domestic life, sweeping chronology) is the version of the city that this project works to complicate.
Core Rebuffat, René. 1969. "Maisons à péristyle d'Afrique du Nord: répertoire de plans publiés." Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire 81 (2): 659–724. The standard comparative catalogue of North African peristyle houses, still the reference point for any domestic-architecture comparison in the region. Rebuffat also warns explicitly against trusting Courtois's 1951 plans as precise, a warning worth keeping visible.
Core Yelles, Anissa. 2024. "Archives croisées d'Albert Ballu à Timgad: étude spatiale de la ville et de ses fouilles." Frontière·s 10. The critical turn the field needed. Yelles reads Ballu's photographic and excavation archives against each other to recover what his published reports flattened out, and to show what colonial-era documentation chose to foreground.
Ballu, Albert. 1897. Guide de Timgad, antique Thamugadi. Paris: Ernest Leroux.
Ballu, Albert. 1901–1926. Rapports sur les travaux de fouilles en Algérie. Annual official reports. Paris and Algiers: Service des Monuments Historiques de l'Algérie. Reports cited individually: 1901, 1904, 1905–1909, 1911–1912, 1916–1919, 1921–1922, 1923, 1924, 1925–1926.
Ballu, Albert. 1903. Les ruines de Timgad: nouvelles découvertes. Paris: E. Leroux.
Ballu, Albert. 1911. Les ruines de Timgad: sept années de découvertes (1903–1910). Paris: Neurdein.
Boissière, Gustave. 1883. L'Algérie romaine. 2nd ed. Paris: Hachette.
Cagnat, René. 1891. "Les fouilles de Timgad, séance du 15 mai 1891." Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 35 (3): 209–218.
Cagnat, René. 1892. L'armée romaine d'Afrique et l'occupation militaire de l'Afrique sous les empereurs. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.
Cagnat, René. 1902. "Note sur des découvertes nouvelles survenues en Afrique." Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 46 (1): 37–46.
Cagnat, René. 1904. "Le tracé primitif de Thamugadi." Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 48 (4): 460–469.
Cagnat, René. 1909. Carthage, Timgad, Tébessa et les villes antiques de l'Afrique du Nord. Les villes d'art célèbres. Paris: H. Laurens.
Christofle, Marcel. 1930. Rapport sur les travaux de fouilles et consolidations effectués en 1927, 1928 et 1929 par le Service des Monuments Historiques de l'Algérie. Alger: Jules Carbonel.
Christofle, Marcel. 1935. Rapport sur les travaux de fouilles et de consolidations effectués en 1930, 1931 et 1932 par le Service des Monuments Historiques de l'Algérie. Alger: Jules Carbonel.
Christofle, Marcel. 1938. Rapport sur les travaux de fouilles et de consolidation effectués en 1933, 1934, 1935 et 1936 par le Service des Monuments Historiques de l'Algérie. Alger: Jules Carbonel.
Courtois, Christian. 1951. Timgad, antique Thamugadi. Algiers: Service des Antiquités de l'Algérie.
Germain, Suzanne. 1969. Les mosaïques de Timgad: étude descriptive et analytique. Paris: CNRS.
Gosden, Chris. 2004. Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gsell, Stéphane. 1901. Les monuments antiques de l'Algérie. 2 vols. Paris: Fontemoing.
Lassus, Jean. 1966. "Une opération immobilière à Timgad." In Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire offerts à André Piganiol, edited by Raymond Chevallier, 1221–1231. Paris: SEVPEN.
Lassus, Jean. 1981. La forteresse byzantine de Thamugadi. Fouilles à Timgad, 1938–1956. Études d'Antiquités africaines. Paris: CNRS.
Le Glay, Marcel, and Serge Tourrenc. 1985. "Nouvelles inscriptions de Timgad sur des légats de la troisième Légion Auguste." Antiquités africaines 21: 103–136.
Lepelley, Claude. 1981. Les cités de l'Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire, Tome II: Notices d'histoire municipale. Paris: Études Augustiniennes.
Leschi, Louis. 1947. "Découvertes récentes à Timgad: Aqua Septimiana Felix." Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 91 (1): 87–99.
Leveau, Philippe. 1988. "Review: La forteresse byzantine de Thamugadi (Lassus 1981)." Revue des Études Anciennes 90 (3-4): 487–488.
Pachtère, Félix-Georges de. 1911. Inventaire des mosaïques de la Gaule et de l'Afrique, Tome III: Afrique proconsulaire, Numidie, Maurétanie (Algérie). Paris: Ernest Leroux.
Pallu de Lessert, Augustin-Clément. 1896. Fastes des provinces africaines (Proconsulaire, Numidie, Maurétanies) sous la domination romaine. Tome I: République et Haut Empire. Paris: Ernest Leroux.
Poinssot, Julien. 1884. "Inscriptions inédites de Lambèse et de Timgad." Bulletin trimestriel des antiquités africaines 2: 202–208.
Rebuffat, René. 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.
Habitus, identity, and discrepant experience
For this project, space syntax and household archaeology give us the architecture, while Bourdieu’s habitus and Mattingly’s discrepant identities give us the lives lived inside it. Yvon Thébert’s line that domus referred not only to the walls but also to the people within them is the project’s organizing claim, and these works are a sample of where it comes from.
Core Thébert, Yvon. 1987. "Private Life and Domestic Architecture in Roman Africa." In A History of Private Life, Vol. I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, edited by Paul Veyne, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 313–409. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. The essay whose opening move, that domus refers not only to the walls but also to the people within them, is the organizing quotation of this entire site. Thébert's work remains foundational, shaping how Wallace-Hadrill and many of the scholars who followed came to think about the relationship between public and private in Roman domestic space. He also took North African houses seriously on their own terms, rather than as provincial echoes of Italy.
Core Mattingly, David J. 2011. Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The case for discrepant identities, the framework that replaces a single "Roman" identity with the many partial, layered, sometimes contradictory identities people actually held inside the empire.
Core Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The source of habitus, the durable dispositions that let a built environment and a set of bodily practices reproduce a social order without anyone naming the rules out loud. Domestic architecture is where habitus becomes visible.
Core Woolf, Greg. 1998. Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reframed provincial identity as something actively authored by local communities rather than handed down from Rome.
Works in press, conference papers, and unpublished theses that Kim has read but has not yet cataloged here are tracked in the internal literature-review database and will filter onto this page as the project evolves.
Space syntax, household archaeology, and method
Space syntax, first developed by Hillier and Hanson, treats a built environment as a relational system that shapes movement, visibility, and interaction. Its tools let us measure how houses at Timgad structured circulation, encounters, privacy, and labor. Household archaeology comes at the same house from the other side, reading it as an arena of daily practice where, as Swenson and Bourdieu both argue, repeated movement through rooms quietly reproduces the social order. Together, the two traditions treat the house as both evidence and agent. They shape how this project reads Timgad, and the wider argument it hopes to make about provincial life in the Roman empire.
Core Hillier, Bill, and Julienne Hanson. 1984. The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The founding statement of space syntax. Buildings are read as configurations of accessible spaces, not as aesthetic objects, and the grammar of those configurations is what carries social meaning.
Core Allison, Penelope M., ed. 1999. The Archaeology of Household Activities. London: Routledge. Reframed Roman domestic studies around what people actually did in rooms rather than what an architectural typology assigned them to do. This is the move that lets a workshop inside a "house" be read as part of how the household actually worked.
Core Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. 1994. Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The comparative baseline that nearly every Roman house study is still measured against.
Fisher, Kevin D. 2023. Monumentality, Place-Making and Social Interaction on Late Bronze Age Cyprus. Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology 17. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing.
Grahame, Mark. 1997. "Public and Private in the Roman House: The Spatial Order of the Casa del Fauno." In Domestic Space in the Roman World: Pompeii and Beyond, edited by Ray Laurence and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, 137–164. Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 22. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology.
Rapoport, Amos. 1990. The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Assassi, Abdelhalim, and Ahmed Mebarki. 2021. "Spatial Configuration Analysis via Digital Tools of the Archeological Roman Town Timgad, Algeria." Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 21 (1): 71–84.
Djouadi, Hana, Azeddine Belakehal, and Paola Zanovello. 2025. "The Luminous Ambience of an Ancient Roman Public Building: A Characterization of the Inner Daylit Environment of Rogatianus Library in Thamugadi City (Timgad, Algeria)." Heritage 8 (8): 300.
Guedouh, Marouane Samir, et al. 2025. "Military Strategies of Roman Cities Establishment Based on the Space Syntax Analysis Applied to the Vestiges of Timgad." Heritage 8 (8): 324.
How to cite
Edher, Kim. 2026. “Scholarship.” Houses of Roman Timgad. Accessed [Month Day, Year]. https://timgadhouses.org/scholarship/.
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