Conversations: How the Historical Sausage Gets Made, Roman Colonization of North Africa w/ Matthew McCarty

Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! Greek & Roman Mythology Retold

Liv Albert

History, Comedy, Arts

4.8 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2025

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Liv and Michaela speak with Roman archaeologist Matthew McCarty about Rome's colonization of North Africa and how that act of settler colonialism had ripple effects in the later French colonization. Find more from Matthew here. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email or a voice note. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby

CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.

Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The President Hello, this is let's talk about myths, baby, And I am your host, Live.
0:38.8	Here with another conversation episode.
0:41.4	Okay, so today's episode is with Matthew McCarty, who is a associate professor of Roman archaeology at UBC.
0:50.4	And we came to his research because, well, Michaela goes to UBC, and it was absolutely delightful
0:59.2	to speak about this.
1:02.3	So the topic, as you'll be able to tell from my questions, is not something I am familiar
1:08.6	with, but something I was desperate to know more about.
1:12.4	So we talked about Roman North Africa and, I mean, colonialism broadly, also how the colonization of North Africa by Rome kind of led to the colonization of North Africa by France, and also how all of that ties in with archaeology and how we learn what we know and what biases exist in how we learn what we know about the ancient world.
1:48.5	This is a really, really fascinating conversation, just as this kind of perfect encapsulation
1:55.5	of how history is influenced by everything, but also everyone, who was ever involved with it,
2:06.6	whether it was the history being made or interpreted, but also interpreted over generations,
2:16.0	centuries, millennia, and just what that does to what we know
2:20.3	or what we think we know and how now we are looking at how to break down what we thought
2:29.3	we knew because it turns out it was all framed through an absolutely unhinged colonial lens.
2:37.8	Really, really fascinating conversation. Of course, we talk about how this ties in with settler colonialism.
2:44.5	Now, I will say this conversation was recorded a couple months ago now, maybe even three. So it was prior to the
2:53.8	Canadian election that only kind of comes up broadly or really briefly. But it was also prior to,
3:00.5	I mean, I don't, everything going on in Gaza is worse every day.
3:10.5	And I'm just utterly horrified.
3:14.9	And you can tell in my, the way I try to talk about it, sometimes it's really hard. And I, I kind of have to laugh through it, obviously not about what's happening, but just
3:20.1	about the way that the, the echoes of it are felt in the ancient world because to me,
	...

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