Staging Archaeology: Empire as Reality Effect at the 1906–07 fêtes de Carthage

Organized by a private association with the support of the French Protectorate, the 1906 and 1907 pageants or fêtes de Carthage, held at a recently excavated Roman theatre at an important site of ancient colonization, celebrated the achievements and the promise of archaeology in Tunisia. Inspired by open-air theatricals in the ancient theatres of Orange and Béziers, the elaborate stagings involved hundreds of actors, large volunteer crews, and sumptuous period costumes. After a program of excerpts from neoclassical drama and opera in 1906, the 1907 pageant featured two specially commissioned plays, one of them an encounter between a modern-day poet and a Carthaginian priestess on the very archaeological site where her tomb is discovered. The pageants drew on both specific archaeological findings and a pervasive visual culture that depicted French colonizers as preservers of the ancient culture of which they had found traces in North Africa. The violence of colonization was thus consigned to the realm of performance and archaeology cast as a valuable source of knowledge. Although the pageants operated in a nostalgic mode, they ultimately served a more historicist sense of time in which archaeology as an emerging science helped to police the boundary between past and present.