A Roman city was a bounded space. Defined by borders both physical and conceptual, the city stood apart as a concentration of life and activity that was divided from its rural surroundings not only physically, but also legally, economically, and ritually. Death was a key area of control, and tombs were relegated outside city walls from the Republican period through Late Antiquity. Given this separation, an unexpected phenomenon marked the Augustan and early Imperial periods: Roman cities developed suburbs, built-up areas beyond their boundaries, where the living and the dead came together in environments that could become densely urban. Life and Death in the Roman Suburb examines these districts, drawing on the archaeological remains of cities across Italy to understand their character and to illuminate the factors that led to their rise and decline, with a particular focus on the tombs of the dead. Work on Roman cities still tends to pass over funerary material, while research on death has concentrated on issues seen as separate from urbanism. This book aims to reconnect those threads, considering tombs within their suburban landscapes of shops, houses, workshops, garbage dumps, extramural sanctuaries, and major entertainment buildings to trace the many roles they played within living cities. It argues that tombs were not passive memorials, but active spaces that both facilitated and furthered the social and economic life of the city, where relationships between the living and the dead were an enduring aspect of urban life.

“Death in the Suburb” aims to understand tombs as urban phenomena in Roman cities. Focusing on Rome itself, the only site where a detailed and diachronic examination is possible, it charts the relationship of the city with its tombs as it grew from a settlement of scattered villages into the bustling capital of a vast empire. Above all, the investigation indicates complexity; at no point were the dead clearly separated from the living city. Past work has emphasized the residual nature of suburban funerary monuments, arguing that they had been present outside the wall before the city expanded and so recalled vigilant separation even as they stood in the midst of developing suburbs. This chapter finds a different situation: monumental tombs emerged along with suburbs, with buildings for the living and the dead growing side by side to create districts that assumed the presence of both life and death.

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Pompeii has been the focus of archaeological research for over 250 years, but true archaeological excavation remains a rarity at the site. Despite increasing emphasis on the subsurface deposits over the past decades, only an estimated 2% of the town has been systematically excavated, as opposed to the 66% that has been cleared of volcanic overburden. 1 Outside the walls, in the necropoleis that dominate the suburbium, excavation has been practically non-existent. 2 In publishing the careful excavation of a Pompeian tomb group, therefore, Mourir à Pompéi makes a significant contribution to Pompeian studies. The two beautifully-produced volumes provide detailed documentation of the excavated contexts, inviting future work on a wide variety of topics.

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