The villa is considered emblematic of Roman rural settlement. As such, it is often seen as an unproblematic category of evidence, easily understood (by reference to Classical sources) as an elite residence at the heart of a country estate, built and maintained by wealth generated through (arable) agriculture. The presence of a Roman villa on the edge of the Roman world at modern Hoogeloon, The Netherlands, inevitably calls into question whether such easy assumptions can be made about villas in the northern provinces.

Hoogeloon was located within the territory of the Roman civitas Tungrorum, itself centred on modern Tongeren, in neighbouring Belgium. This civitas contained a variety of landscapes, with an agriculturally rich loess soil belt dividing the hilly Ardennes to the south from the relatively infertile cover-sand Kempen region to the north. Although the loess belt has produced archaeological evidence for a significant concentration of villas, that at Hoogeloon is the only example known from 40 years’ extensive excavation in the Kempen, an area characterised in the Roman period by the continuation of indigenous building techniques and a reliance on pastoralism. Moreover, even though the villa house itself followed a similar developmental trajectory to others in the civitas, it was, unusually, accompanied by buildings of traditional type rather than further ‘Romanised’ structures. Sunken cattle byres and other features within the compound indicate extensive livestock management activities, while evidence of surplus arable production is absent.

The villa was originally excavated by Jan Slofstra in the 1980s as part of a project that became pivotal in regional studies and dig-folklore for a generation of Dutch archaeologists. The current volume, a milestone event, is one outcome of an ambitious programme by VU University Amsterdam to make the results of those excavations internationally accessible. At the same time, it provides a regional synthesis of Roman rural habitation on the northern sandy soils of the civitas Tungrorum, and contributes to ongoing debates on the social, economic and cultural transformation of the Roman countryside, particularly in ‘peripheral’ regions (defined loosely as those in which signs of romanitas were rare).

This volume is not an exhaustive study of the villa settlement itself. Here, only the main findings are summarised, with extensive excavation reports (in Dutch) for the project's three key sites available online (Hiddink & Aarts Reference Hiddink and Aarts2011; 2013; Hiddink Reference Hiddink2014). Instead, this is a synthetic work, offering a series of essays that contextualise the villa settlement from a variety of perspectives in an effort to understand the processes by which it came into being and the integration of this ‘peripheral’ area within wider social structures and economy. Crucial is the insight that local groups were integrated into supra-local and regional communities, and that ethnic identities were situational constructs. This is reflected in the varying scales of analysis employed in the specialist contributions that demonstrate links between other villas, pagi (rural territories), regional centres and the wider Roman world.

The opening chapter, by Roymans and Derks, clearly outlines the theoretical insights that underpin the project. A mechanism for social change is posited that rejects the dualities implicit not only in traditional Romanisation models but also in more recent approaches that see the persistence of traditional lifestyles in terms of ‘resistance’. Referring to agency theory and post-colonial theory, the authors suggest that the inhabitants of the region may instead have consciously cultivated and expressed a collective identity in the context of the new political structure in which they found themselves living. The Hoogeloon villa can thus be seen as a case study for the interaction of rural, urban and military (the region lies near the Roman frontier) communities, the local exercise of agency and the creation of a hybrid settlement type expressive of local traditions and values.

The following chapters cover a wide variety of topics. Some concern broader issues such as interpretation of the landscape, settlement patterns, urban-rural relations, the importance of cult places in the construction of supra-local identity and the third-century AD depopulation of the Lower Rhine region. Meanwhile, specialist contributions analyse environmental data, pottery consumption and coin use at the villa site and beyond. There are many helpful areas of overlap where similar patterns of consumption or exchange emerge, or where the evidence is examined from more than one perspective, allowing fuller and more nuanced conclusions. Observations regarding animal husbandry, for example, tie in with those regarding consumption and craft activities in the civitas capital at Tongeren, while pottery-consumption patterns inform the discussion of the market economy and coinage.

Slofstra hypothesised that the villa at Hoogeloon was a specialised cattle ranch. This interpretation has been refined in the current volume to suggest that it was, instead, a collection point for cattle, paid as tribute to the owner of the villa who controlled local grazing rights. Roymans and Derks propose a narrative social history of the settlement from its foundation in the Augustan period, through the rise of a family with military connections, to the construction of the villa and increasing involvement with the city of Tongeren. The villa lasted only into the third century, when it was replaced by a wooden house, which itself was abandoned, as was the entire region, by c. AD 270. If the narrative, as the authors admit, contains speculative elements, then this is the nature of archaeological interpretation, in this case backed by a wealth of artefactual, environmental and circumstantial evidence, and by sophisticated theoretical underpinnings. Although not everyone working in Roman archaeology in the region or elsewhere may agree with the core argument, this monograph and the related excavation reports make the details and discussion of a major and exceptional site available for critical scrutiny.

This is a significant volume, the importance of which goes beyond the intricacies of this individual site. It provides absorbing subject matter for readers interested in the Roman countryside, the rural economy and the incorporation of the provinces (particularly, more ‘marginal’ areas) into the Roman Empire. It does not offer a blueprint for such integration; indeed, the lesson of this project is that such integration could be highly localised. It does, however, demonstrate the diversity of ways hidden in the archaeological record—some perhaps as yet unimagined—of being Roman.