Burial, Society and Context in the Roman World

Although a large number of cemeteries have been explored in Roman Britain they have never been seen as central to the study of the province. A narrowly defined historical tradition of studying the Roman provinces had an almost exclusive hold on British academia until the 1980s. Gradually this situation changed. Major cemetery excavations were increasingly undertaken within the Rescue Archaeology boom and a minority of those working on these sites began to ask what information cemeteries could contribute to our wider understanding. Developing contacts on the continent resulted in the growth of a small, informal network of scholars across Europe, who got together for several conferences. The 28-papers presented in this volume stem from a symposium held under the aegis of the Research Centre for Roman Provincial Archaeology at the University of Durham in 1997. They explore different approaches to the wide diversity of data now available. The papers are grouped under five headings: the reconstruction of mortuary rituals; burial and social status; the dead in the landscape; burial and ethnicity and society; and religion and burial in late Roman Britain and Italy. They range across Europe from Britain to Pannonia and Rome itself.