Event: WEDS TALKS:Archaeological Photography and the Fascist Appropriation of Roman Libya

ABSTRACT: Roman archaeological material played a central role in Italian Fascist propaganda: Mussolini presented his regime as an extension or rebirth of the Roman empire and sponsored major excavation and restoration projects in and beyond Rome. Italian colonial archaeology in Libya extended this project and archaeological remains were positioned as Italian cultural heritage and mobilized to justify colonial occupation by drawing explicit parallels between ancient Roman and modern Italian

expansion. This talk examines the important role photography played in this Fascist appropriation of the Roman past in Libya; by tracing histories of the production, circulation, reception, and assembly into archives of such images, I argue that archaeological photographs were not merely documentary objects but rather functioned aspolitical tools which transformed Libya’s archaeological heritage into monumental symbols of Italian Fascism.

BIO: Taylor Carr-Howard is a Ph.D. candidate in Archaeology at UCLA. Her dissertation, “Archaeological Photographs and the (De)Colonial Imagination,” examines the role that archaeological photography played in the history of French and Italian colonial archaeology in North Africa and,drawing on this history,explores theways in which this photographic archivecan be used to decolonize the discipline of classical archaeology. Her research has been supported by the Archaeological Institute of America.