Geographical Factors in Roman Algeria Author(s): A. N. Sherwin-White Source: The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 34, Parts 1 and 2 (1944), pp. 1-10 Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/296776 . Accessed: 06/05/2011 13:42 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sprs. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Roman Studies. http://www.jstor.org GEOGRAPHICAL FACTORS IN ROMAN ALGERIA By A. N. SHERWIN-WHITE This paper is concerned with the geographical setting.of Roman Algeria and the relation between human settlement and geographical factors, and will contain some comments on the writing of Roman provincial history.' The present may be a suitable moment for those who are no longer occupied directly with scholarship to review the first principles and method of provincial history writing, which were perhaps not altogether sound in the published works, and particularly in the general histories, of the pre-war decade. There were two main types of study. The first were monuments of learning and minute scholar- ship, but tended to convey no general impression at all. The second type were so broad in outline as to be mainly false, a fault particularly marked in the various economic histories and general surveys of the Roman Empire. It is extraordinary that for Roman Africa, with its tens of thousands of inscriptions and superficial ruins and its dozens of town sites, there still exists no coherent or detailed study of part or whole except Toutain's old and excellent account of Tunisia published in I896. Instead, scholars have concentrated either on particular town sites or on the military frontiers and military stations. The military studies are all linked to Cagnat's monumental work about the Roman Army in Africa. The result is that there exists a coherent body of knowledge about this great topic. But the study of town sites has proceeded pretty well in vacuo. Algeria is a vast country and the conjunction of this vastness with the external uniformity of town life has a bewildering effect. We have acquired a pin-point knowledge about specific places, but the life of the towns has not been related to the life and nature of the country. There has also been a tendency to write not about the life of the towns but about their constitutional history. It is not an adequate summary of a province's life to establish that at a certain date it contained a certain number of Roman colonies, municipia and municipalities with Latin rights. These are but the forms clothing a certain development of social, economic, and political activity. The weakness of such methods is that they neglect human geography. This has two parts, the reciprocal effect of man and his environment on one another, and the internal nature of human groups and settlements. First, then, for the environment, the physical geography of Algeria. The country is formed by the eastern extension of the Atlas mountains of Morocco, and is a plateau land high above sea level, broken up by a series of somewhat ill-defined mountain masses. The river system is not sufficiently well developed to mark the pattern of the country. Some rivers cut through from the interior of the country north to the Mediterranean, some drain south to the Sahara, others never escape from the interior plains but are swallowed up by great inland lakes or shotts. Hence Algeria is a country of which it is singularly hard to comprehend the topography. Roman Algeria was all north of the Sahara. A great mass of high land runs N.E. from the Moroccan Atlas and then splits into two main mountain systems, following the 1 The substance of this paper was written for, and found in V. Chapot, Le Monde Romnain (Paris, I927), delivered as, a lecture before the Society after the M. Rostovzeff, Social and Economic History of the Annual General Meeting on 8th June, 1943. 'The Roman Empire (Oxford, 1926), and the Economic Su(rvey main facts about the geography of Algeria are to of Ancient Rome, vol. 4 (Baltimore, I938). T'he be found in the Geographie Universelle, vol. xi, I distribution of the remains of antiquity are plotted in (Paris, I937), A. Bernard, Algerie, ed. 7 (Paris, 1929), the Atlas archeologique de l'Algerie (Paris, i9I i), in or more briefly in E. F. Gautier, L'Afrique blanche a series of sheets on scale : 200,000. S. Gsell, (Paris, I939). Gautier discusses the relation between Histoire aincienne de l'Afriqtue diu Nord (Paris, I913- climate and human settlement in ancient times in his 1928) only reaches to the death of Julius Caesar. stimulating L'islarnisationz de l'Afriqiue dii Nord. Les Particular sites are studied with reference to their Siedclesobsciures dti Maghreb. (Paris, I927). T'he only topography in S. Gsell and C. A. Joly, Khamissa, regional account of human settlement in Algeria is con- Mdaourouch, Annozuna (Paris, I913-1922), and Y. tained, often by implication, in R. Cagnat, L'Artnie Allais, Djemila (Paris, 1938). 'rhese works and personal Romaine d'Afriqie, ed. 2 (Paris, 1913). Numidia is observation are the main basis of this paper, and con- studied with some topographic relevance but less tain most of the facts and some of the theories dis- systematically by T. R. S. Broughton, Romanzisation cussed. Permission to reproduce the maps and of Africa Procoisularis (B3altimore, 1929). Accounts diagrams, some of -which are re-drawings of published of the social and economic development are to be work, was kindly given by the Admiralty. 2 A. N. SHERWIN-WHITE Casablanca arrakech *0uar~~~13cha Agadr ALTITUDES _____/ . ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~FeetMetres 9843 3000 [S A H A w/ A \es6z MIoot 0 00 200 300Ml SeaLeve '?? ? loo 200 300 Sea.Leve Km 400Km. FIG. I. GENERAL PHYSICAL FEATURES OF NORTHI-WEST AFRICA same direction as the coastline and separated by a great belt of high plains or plateaux (fig. I). These three major divisions are from north to south the Tell Atlas, the High Plateaux, and the Saharan Atlas. On fig. i the formations are clearest in the east. The small blocks of mountains in the north between the meridian of Algiers and that of Constantine form the Tell Atlas. In the south-east the great block of mountains, the Aures, are the most easterly section in Algeria of the Saharan Atlas. In western Algeria the Tell Atlas is shown extending in discontinuous blocks eastwards from the Moroccan frontier, beyond which they continue westwards as the Riff mountains; but the hatching does not distinguish clearly between High Plateaux and Saharan Atlas. Such is the general threefold pattern of Algeria; but for human geography these are not the effective units. For these, more detail is necessary. The whole area north of the Sahara breaks up into a number of small compartments, which together form a series of longitudinal east-west belts within the three major divisions already outlined. These smaller compartments are the real units of the country. They are difficult to illustrate except schematically, as in fig. 2, but fig. 3 gives the general structure and trend-lines. Running across the country from west to east there is a series of belts, alternately mountain chains and plains or valleys. In western Algeria (I), west of Shott el Hodna, there are seven such belts between the Sahara and the sea:- I. (i) The great block of coastal mountains east from Oran: Dahra, Miliana, Blida, Grande Kabylie including the high Jurjura (Djurdjura) mountains. (2) The Oran-Bougie depression, a series of valleys and plateaux: plain of Mleta, Cheliff river-valley rising to the Medea plateau, then the Soummam valley to Bougie. (3) The Middle Mountains: the 'Western' Chains, the Ouarsenis, the Titteri, the Biban which swings north-east to reach the coast as the Kabylie des Babors, on the east side of the Soummam section of (z). (4) A long belt of plains and plateaux without a common name: the interior plains of western Algeria, the Mascara plain, the Sersou plateau. GEOGRAPHICAL FACTORS IN ROMAN ALGERIA 3 O" x it,SMASSIF OFBLI .*. _ / MILES 2S O 25 50 75 10~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~C0 12 +IE X t~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ___ ~ ~ ~ PyM/JAN,~ / FIG. 2./THE PHYSICALTRERI OF SOTHF AE OF - '' AnietM.ssfs Mies 0 50 100 15O 20025MMle /~~ -o0gt 4;mlo o O 0 0 m /Anciet f.m120 00 K 0 100 300 400 KM. FIG. 3. THE T YENI)-LINES AND FOLDS IN ALGEIA AND TUNI.SIA The remaining belts are larger and clearer.