Utica’s urban centre from Augustus to the Antonines

Extract

Since 2010, a team from the Tunisian Institut National du Patrimoine and the University of Oxford¹ has been investigating Utica’s monumental centre, located at the tip of the promontory on which the city is built (fig. 1). The range and scale of architectural elements littering this area were remarked upon by most antiquarian investigators of the site. Nathan Davis, working at the site in 1858, noted that, despite the fact that it “had been ransacked for building materials”, this part of the city was covered with “marble and granite shafts, capitals, and cornices, of every order, size, and dimension”.² Alfred Daux even observed that local residents referred to the largest building of the zone as the “Dar Es Sultan” (Palace of the Sultan), such was its magnificence.³ Aerial photographs commissioned by A. Lézine in the 1950s (fig. 2) show the area at the head of the promontory almost completely robbed out during and immediately after the Second World War, giving it a rather desolate aspect.