It's no longer the latest research, but it's sound and it appears to have become a form of comfort reading for me: it was the first academic material I read about Carthage that wasn't the Punic Wars in a Roman history. It's the collected first publication of seven papers presented at a small symposium in 1979, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and its participation in the then-recent UNESCO effort to excavate, restore, and preserve the archaeological heritage of ancient Carthage; I picked it up originally for its opening article, Lawrence E. Stager's "The Rite of Child Sacrifice at Carthage." I did not realize until just now that the author has been, since 1985, the director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, meaning he oversaw the discovery of the Philistine cemetery I was so happy to read about last week. At the time of the symposium, he had been directing excavations at the Commercial Harbor and the Tophet of Carthage since 1975; his paper is a short, solid survey of the evidence for child sacrifice versus other explanations for the urn burials of calcined human remains between the ages of birth and four years, with really interesting attention paid to instances of double interment (newborn plus older child, occasionally newborn twins plus older child) and the diminishing frequency over time of urns containing only the burnt bones of lambs or kids (interpreted to have been substitutes for the promised child). Other papers highlight aspects of Punic, Hellenistic, Roman, Vandal, and Byzantine Carthage, everything from urban planning in different eras to the defenses of the city to studies of its monuments, mosaics, and economies. I hadn't looked at it in a while and I don't have access to my own college-era copy at present, but I thought I remembered giving a copy to my father some years ago and fortunately I was right; as far as I can tell, it all holds up. I'd say it's worth your time.
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Thank you.
How was Pedley's book?
It's no longer the latest research, but it's sound and it appears to have become a form of comfort reading for me: it was the first academic material I read about Carthage that wasn't the Punic Wars in a Roman history. It's the collected first publication of seven papers presented at a small symposium in 1979, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and its participation in the then-recent UNESCO effort to excavate, restore, and preserve the archaeological heritage of ancient Carthage; I picked it up originally for its opening article, Lawrence E. Stager's "The Rite of Child Sacrifice at Carthage." I did not realize until just now that the author has been, since 1985, the director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, meaning he oversaw the discovery of the Philistine cemetery I was so happy to read about last week. At the time of the symposium, he had been directing excavations at the Commercial Harbor and the Tophet of Carthage since 1975; his paper is a short, solid survey of the evidence for child sacrifice versus other explanations for the urn burials of calcined human remains between the ages of birth and four years, with really interesting attention paid to instances of double interment (newborn plus older child, occasionally newborn twins plus older child) and the diminishing frequency over time of urns containing only the burnt bones of lambs or kids (interpreted to have been substitutes for the promised child). Other papers highlight aspects of Punic, Hellenistic, Roman, Vandal, and Byzantine Carthage, everything from urban planning in different eras to the defenses of the city to studies of its monuments, mosaics, and economies. I hadn't looked at it in a while and I don't have access to my own college-era copy at present, but I thought I remembered giving a copy to my father some years ago and fortunately I was right; as far as I can tell, it all holds up. I'd say it's worth your time.