Imed Ben Jerbania - Punic Archaeology

Dr Imed Ben Jerbania is Director of Phoenician and Punic Sites and Monuments at the Tunisian Institut National du Patrimoine. After undergraduate and postgraduate study at the University of Tunis, he obtained a doctorate in Archaeology from Aix-en-Provence in 2005. Since then he has excavated at many of Tunisia’s Punic and Roman sites, including Utica, where he has worked over the last decade with the Oxford-based excavations (which we co-direct with Lisa Fentress (Rome)), as well as with French and Spanish teams at the site.

Dr Ben Jerbania is staying in Oxford as a TORCH International Fellow in Trinity Term 2019, and he is hosted by Dr Josephine Quinn and Professor Andrew Wilson.

During his stay, he will work on three main projects:

• Utica: the oldest city. Recent excavations at Utica suggest that the city is the oldest migrant foundation in the Maghreb and perhaps in the western Mediterranean as a whole. Dr Ben Jerbania will explore the implications of the new data in terms of the encounter between Levantine migrants and the local population, by examining the evidence for the site’s early pottery, urbanism, construction and economy (all specialisms of the Archaeology Faculty at Oxford).
• The social history of the dead: Dr Ben Jerbania will use his excavations of Late Punic cemeteries at Beni Rafa and Ras Zbib in the region of Bizerte as the basis of a comparative study of the development of two very different communities in the same region.
• New Perspectives on Child Sacrifice: Dr Ben Jerbania’s ground-breaking excavations at the Carthage Tophet over the last five years, the first for forty years, have provided a wealth of new material and new stratigraphic information which require rethinking the chronology and function of this sanctuary. Dr Ben Jerbania will publish the first synthesis of this material.