Villas, Sanctuaries, and Settlement in the Romano-British Countryside

REVIEW BY NEIL HOLBROOK Did all the buildings in the Roman countryside that we call ‘villas’ perform the same function? Were they mostly nicely appointed homes of people who had done well at farming, or country residences of the well-to-do with little connection to the surrounding land? The opening premise of this book is to challenge the notion that all villas were farms, which is tackled in a collection of papers from a 2009 conference. While there has been a little updating, readers should be mindful that much of what is written here is more than a decade old. There is a noticeable emphasis on western Britain, and the volume contains some interim essays on excavations not yet fully