Nejib Ben Lazreg, Institut National du Patrimoine, Tunisia

Archaeolog: what are the pressing issues facing archaeology in Tunisia today?
Ben Lazreg: First of all, conservation. Rapid economic development has occurred over the last 30 years. The quality of live is changing. People are building more and more houses in step with the state investing in agriculture, amenities, highways, dams, airports, hotels; infrastructure.
After centuries of sleep, Tunisia has finally woken up: families now want their own house, rather than living with the extended family; traditional shallow plow agriculture with cattle has transformed into modern agriculture with deep plows pulled by tractors; hotels are developing along the eastern coast; industry is now ubiquitous. Any Tunisian city occupies the same strategic place as that of early cities and this has implications as to infrastructural development. Whereas early cities were small, modern cities extend. All this has archaeological consequences.
Accompanying these changes comes looting, moreover. And, of course, collectors, antiquaries, and some museums commission this. Punic lamps are highly priced, for example.
Now for an emerging country Tunisia is one of the archaeologically richest in the Mediterranean; this is exemplified by the density of archaeological sites. With my period, the Roman, alone, there are just over 22,000 sites in northern and central Tunisia—an area of about 600 kilometers north south, by 200 kilometers east west at the maximum. Out of the 22,000 plus sites there were 200 hundred big cities. Some cities are covered by medieval or modern towns. Others, such the coastal town of Hadrumetum and many others are still in the wilds. Some of these won’t wait long. They are either next to large towns or near the beach and there is a great deal of pressure to expand.
In Tunisia everything underground is state property. Diamond mines, oil, archaeology; all belong to the state. As most of the sites are on private property, in terms of archaeology, this is a good thing—this is an inherited law from the French, so most people don’t dare to dig by themselves and sale.
However, at the end of the day the government cannot buy all of these fields. This it has to do in order to undertake full site preservation. The 1994 Tunisian heritage code tries to protect monuments and sites, but it still has many faults; faults that can be exploited by good lawyers. A site can be protected only if can be classified and this, in a sense, freezes it so as not to be built on in any way.
In the midst of all this development we cannot catch up.

Archaeolog: how many archaeologists are undertaking rescue work in Tunisia?
Ben Lazreg. This depends on what you consider to be an archaeologist. There are maybe 40 field archaeologists at most—maybe. This number excludes many museum curators. Even if we put all the non-field researchers in the field, that wouldn’t add but a few to this number.
We use local workmen and students, but you need specialists for bone, stucco, construction material, pottery, etc. for both the dig and the after dig. The after dig includes the study of materials, preservation, and publication. Survey before the dig never tells you what you will find. You think you are digging a bath and you hit tombs, so it is extremely difficult to anticipate for what you will find. Excavation, restoration, and survey are all supported by public funds and this problem of anticipation extends to project budgeting. This is also a problem of need: we need both the requisite skilled personnel and we need flexible finances. Both are lacking.
Archaeolog: can you give us a specific example of these constraints?
Ben Lazreg: Excavations often have very pour budgets and short deadlines. So one has to move very quickly. Sometimes you can freeze a project for future work. However, far more often one cannot.
Consider the case of excavating stuccos. Stucco often adheres to chunks of rubble. I have encountered cases where one did not know that they were moving through rubble with stuccos. It was only by cleaning them that we found frescos. It is surely the case that many of these have been missed by moving quick through the rubble.
There is a difference between hospital surgery and military surgery in the field. When you are by yourself in the trench in the midst of battle one cannot afford to do careful surgery. We have to do war surgery. This is all the more pressing in our country where we have difficulty finding solutions for the living much less the dead.
Archaeolog: what do you see as the solutions to these problems you mention?
Ben Lazreg: There are many. Our current policy is to train students and now there is university training, but there is not an established tradition of this. Archaeology is a very new topic of concern in our university system. It has been around 6 or 10 years at most. Indeed, my training is in Classics, in Latin. My archaeological training came by working in the summers.
We have a collaborative tradition among historical disciplines dating back to the 60s or 70s where many professors from Tunisian universities, historians, for example, lend a hand in studying the past. Historians pitch in. However, we are not accustomed to the kinds of multi-disciplinary collaboration one finds between different universities and departments in other parts of the worlds. Those that study bird bones, for example, have their own problems and limited budgets.
This is slowly changing and there is a change with, for example, scholars who interested in studying the Phoenician diet. So the first solution is to expand collaboration between different disciplines. We need to show how this is both good for our studies and good for other researchers to have the results.
The second has to do with the issue of technique. We lack specialists who work on stuccos, for example. We lack training in field archaeology, training laboratory techniques in the universities. We need different teams of trained professionals with synergistic skill sets.
The third solution has to do with preventive interventions. Preventative means we do not wait for the discovery to happen. We need to work with planners ahead of time and we need to send teams out to survey and dig ahead of any construction work. This is again a problem of numbers. More personnel are needed on the ground.
This brings us to the fourth solution: to intensify the corporation with foreign institutions. We learn and they learn. This exchange is very important on all sides. Techniques for how to dig, how to plan, how to publish can be exchanged. A good example here was the UNESCO campaign at Cartage 1974 – 1983: a collaboration between the German Institute at Rome, the French school at Rome, two Canadian Universities, Michigan, and Oxford. These institutes and universities not only dug separately, but they had seminars and they exchanged a lot. In the process, we Tunisians learned a great deal; we became more aware of how to exploit the data scientifically.
We simply lack the manpower and knowhow to confront these challenges. Plant seeds, pollen data, archaeometry, remote sensing; these things don’t exist in Tunisia. We don’t have the equipment. We don’t’ have the knowhow. And yet, these techniques would help us in our collaboration, in the questions we can address, in the detail of the information we produce, and in our preventative measures, to be sure.
Archaeolog: so you can involve foreign universities in preventive archaeology . . .
Ben Lazreg: Yes. We are open to this. We are open to a mutual agreement where foreigners work with us. Of course, we have to follow legal procedures, such as specifying where to excavate, the duration of the project, requisite work for preservation, and final publications. We are open to collaboration with anybody, that is, unless someone has a bad reputation.
In the past we have found archaeologists from the outside digging in locations for which they did not have permission. Or claiming discoveries on their own without giving due credit to local collaborators. This relationship must be based upon mutual respect and trust.
There is so very much to be done. We have recently set up a project with Oxford University under the direction of Andrew Wilson. This will involve a join team to work in Utica. The English can bring anyone one they want in the team: diverse makeup is all the better. Of course, these must be institutional agreements as individuals can move on.
Utica was a Phonecian then Roman harbor. However, it is now 10 kilometers inland and we don’t know where the harbors are. So the project will involve survey and carottage. In this, Oxford will work with Spanish and Italian teams already there. And, of course, they will involve Tunisians. We are open for any proposal, museum work, fieldwork, planning, survey, so long as we all come to an agreement over priorities.
Similarly, we have to consider cultural heritage differently. We can’t just dig. We have to consider economic and social issues involved. We have to use archaeology as a social and economic motor. We have to invest in local communities to develop heritage as a cultural and tourist draw. We have to consider the economic outcomes along with the intellectual ones. We put a great deal of money into sites without returns, we need more income generating sites to help with work elsewhere.
We have to think economically and we have to have a strategy to create new sites. We have to consider cultural heritage as a source of income. We need people to market this. We don’t have the people to do this. Digital media, workshops who produce replicas, we are still in 19th century. We have to involve the private sector more in generating responsible and careful solutions that can be put out there and be shown to actually work.