Interpreting the Transformation of Late Roman Villas: The Case of Hispania

Abstract

The fourth century AD was a period of renaissance for rural residential architecture. In the Iberian Peninsula, as in other areas of the western Roman Empire, many villas, built in the first and second centuries AD, were partly or completely rebuilt and their residential buildings endowed with monumental architectural forms and luxury decorations. At the same time other rural villas experienced significant changes in their organisation and lost their residential character, which was replaced by new, essentially agricultural or industrial, functions (for an overview see Chavarría and Lewit, forthcoming). A first phase of such changes took place in Hispania from the third century onwards and more commonly during the fourth and fifth centuries, affecting principally the villas in the east and south of the Iberian Peninsula. Contemporaneously, the villas located in inland regions (Castilian plateau and Lusitania) experienced an enlargement and redecoration of their residential buildings in the fourth and fifth centuries. A second phase of transformation took place from the middle of the fifth century, from when the complexes of the inland regions also experienced more or less drastic changes in their character, which led to a gradual disintegration and loss of their main residential areas; these came to be occupied by much more rudimentary forms of habitat evidenced by poorly built or timber walls, huts and hearths, frequently associated with burials or sometimes with a cultic use of the site.

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