INTRODUCTION

This article concerns itself with the privileged burials of the villa landscapes between Cologne and Bavay, in a period spanning the 1st to the 3rd centuries AD. The term ‘privileged burials’ derives from francophone scholarship, where it is employed to describe a burial which fulfils one or more of three criteria: 1) it is indicated by a particularly prominent marker; 2) it is accompanied by ‘valuable’ grave goods; or 3) it enjoys a special location in the landscape. Because of these characteristics, these burials have previously been referred to as elite burials, a label which is deliberately avoided here, for a number of reasons. The first of these is revealed elsewhere in this volume by Roymans and Derks, namely that the majority of villa settlements with which these burials are associated do not belong to the very top level of luxury dwelling and massive enterprise; they belong, rather, to a broad middle class of villa-inhabitants. The second reason for steering away from the notion of elite burials is more of a general caveat within mortuary archaeology: the degree of wealth evident in a burial is by no means a direct correlate of the means of the deceased in his or her lifetime. Some peoples invest more in burying their dead than in their housing, others inter even their wealthiest members in humble pits; as a consequence, we are not looking at one-to-one reflections of lived economic status. A third reason is the problems inherent in defining a villa elite, or indeed, any elite. The term tends to be employed instinctually, without establishing clear criteria, as such criteria tend to be somewhat arbitrary or forced. This has largely to do with an implicit assumption that the lines were blurry in the past too; a plausible hypothesis, but not a particularly useful one for performing an analysis. And the fourth major reason for labelling these burials privileged rather than elite is that some of the evidence is quite conflicting. While some of these sites are undoubtedly special, the actual financial investment in their construction is questionable, which distances us from the concept of the deceased as a member of the elite.