Overview

The Dutch province of Limburg, as it exists now, once bordered the frontier zone of the Roman Empire. It was known for its fertile soils, where, especially in the south, a villa landscape developed during the first three centuries CE. Many of these Roman villas were excavated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, without being analysed, and publications relating to these sites did not meet contemporary standards. The Leiden Villa Project, conducted between 2022 and 2024 by a team of researchers from the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Limburgs Museum in Venlo, The Roman Museum in Heerlen and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, aimed at filling in this lacuna. The project also paid attention to other aspects, such as the research history in Dutch Limburg, the burials that were associated with the Roman villa settlements, and aspects of conservation and heritage management. This project has resulted in an up-to-date overview of more than twenty villa settlements, presented here in this volume, together with information on the more recently studied villa sites in the Netherlands, and the villa landscapes in Germany, Belgium and France. Accompanied by a study focused on the end of the Roman villas, this volume offers new and thought-provoking perspectives for anyone studying Roman villas in Northwestern Europe, or the phenomenon of the Roman villa in general.

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Jasper de Bruin studied Roman Archaeology at the University of Amsterdam. After graduating, he worked as an archaeologist, lecturer and researcher at Leiden University for almost fifteen years. During that time, he completed his PhD on the Cananefates, a rural community along the Lower German Frontier of the Roman Empire. Since 2019, he has been curator of the Dutch Roman Collections at the National Museum of Antiquities. Here, De Bruin focuses broadly on the material culture and archaeological theory of the Roman period in Northwestern Europe.

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