INTRODUCTION

A look at the landscape of south-eastern Britain in the Roman period shows a widespread, if uneven, pattern of the stone founded, sometimes elaborately furnished buildings that archaeologists call villas (fig. 1). But what are we to make of these buildings and their significance to the landscapes of the western Roman provinces? Over the years much archaeological debate about villas has tended to centre on two rather different perspectives. In one, the villa is seen as primarily an economic institution; the core of an estate whose presence is an indication of a ‘Romanised’ agricultural landscape producing food and other materials for the urban and military markets of the empire. Implicit in some of this work has been a tendency to see villas as de facto indicators of agricultural improvement in the post-conquest landscape. In the second view villas are seen more as social phenomenon in which they are regarded as a form of cultured status display. Thus we have seen much focus on the developing architecture and spatial organisation of villa houses leading sometimes to rather sterile speculation on the status of their owners or the detailed nature of their resident household(s).

Whilst both approaches have value, alone each represents an unnecessarily constrained view of the idea of the villa and its importance in social discourses about becoming Roman in the western Roman provinces. In an insightful essay on the subject Nicholas Purcell noted that such a distinction was unnecessary to Roman eyes, rightly concluding that ‘the choice of the villa owner is not between on the one hand quietly getting on with the agricultural job and on the other making a splash through elegant decoration; agriculture and elegance are alternative forms of display’. In developing the ideal of the villa there was in practice no incompatibility between the care with which the house and the agricultural facilities were designed.

In this paper I want to focus on this dual view of the villa and how the study of rural sites more generally can help us to understand the extent to which such ideas were enacted, adapted or ignored in the western provinces. In the overview that follows, I want to focus on three aspects of this process at work.