This collection of twenty-one papers by French, Italian, German, and British scholars is a welcome addition to the growing literature on innovative and exciting archaeological fieldwork in cemeteries in many parts of the Roman world. The volume is the product of a project funded by the European Union entitled ‘Vivere e morire nell’impero romano: nuove perspettive dell’archeologia funeraria’, organized by and under the participation of the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma, the École Française de Rome, the Collège de France and the University of Cambridge, as well as other Italian and French universities. The compilation of papers represents those given at two conferences in 2005. We are presented here with a wide variety of types of evidence for death and burial and different approaches to understanding the social significance of funerary customs. The main focus of all the contributions is directly or indirectly the evidence for funerary rituals at the grave, either those performed immediately before burial, at the burial itself, or on recurring occasions thereafter. Evidence for the ritual destruction of wine amphorae after the funeral feast at sites in Luxembourg (Gaeng and Metzler), for food offerings of various kinds in graves in Mainz (Witteyer), and for the production of custom-made wooden coffins in Ravenna (Leoni, Maioli and Montevecchi) offers intriguing glimpses into the range of preparations and activities involved in burial and commemoration. Other contributions deal with methodological issues such as the excavation and study of animal remains in graves (Méniel), the recovery and potential of vegetal remains (Zech-Matterne), or the excavation and restoration of grave goods (Angelini, Bandini, Colacicchi, Polakova and Rapinesi). There are also some tantalizing insights into the development-led excavations of numerous cemeteries around Rome in the last ten years or more (Buccellato, Catalano and Musco), but it is hoped that at some point interim reports such as this one will give way to detailed excavation studies with the results of the related multidisciplinary research being made available to the scholarly community.

There is not enough scope here to discuss all papers in detail, but for me two stand out. The first is the preliminary report on recent excavations by the École Française in the necropolis outside the Porta Nocera at Pompeii (Lepetz and van Andringa). Although the tombs on this suburban road were cleared of volcanic debris from the eruption of Vesuvius as long ago as 1954, the original excavations did not involve an investigation of the subsoil. The precinct chosen by the French team encloses one of the most interesting tomb monuments in the whole cemetery (precinct 23OS): that built by the freedman Publius Vesonius Phileros for himself, his patroness Vesonia, and his fellow freedman and friend Marcus Orfellius Faustus. The monument itself has two inscriptions on the façade, the original one naming the three inhabitants and a second one attached later that publicly advertised a serious rift between the two men. In it the aggrieved Phileros puts a curse on his former friend. This state of affairs made the exploration of the actual burials within the precinct of great interest; here was the potential to see how this bitter change in personal relations might have influenced or changed the provision of graves within the burial community. The results are fascinating. The pre-prepared pit for the ash urn of Faustus was backfilled and his inscribed grave-marker erased and broken off. Even though Faustus was expelled from the cemetery plot and his body not interred here, however, neither his image nor his name was removed from the front of the tomb, and, in fact, the second inscription damning him for all eternity brings all the more attention in a very public way to what Phileros considered Faustus’ disgrace. There is a dichotomy here between the private and public, as in the more intimate and less visible space behind the monument Faustus was simply ‘removed’ and his memory eradicated.

The second paper worth particular mention is immediately connected to the excavations in precinct 23OS at Pompeii. Written by an acknowledged expert on the recovery of human remains in archaeological contexts (Duday), this paper discusses the burial of an infant between six and nine months of age, not cremated as Roman written sources would have us believe was customary for children who died after six months, but interred. An important sign that attention was paid to the dead child (a kind of attention not mentioned in any ancient literary sources and often doubted by modern scholars for children this young) is not only the use of an amphora to protect the tiny body, but also the likelihood that the baby's head had been supported by a small cushion, a situation suggested by the position of the vertebrae at the base of the skull. For any discussion of the treatment of children in funerary contexts and the role of infants in the family and society, this is a significant find.

Not all the contributions present such new evidence; some of the sites discussed here have been published more than once in earlier compilations of papers on death, burial and funerary customs. Generally the quality of photos, plans and illustrations is very good, and it is useful to see a paragraph-long synopsis of each paper at the back of the book. It would have been more widely useful, however, if these had been written in English, rather than in the many languages of the papers themselves.