INTRODUCTION

For a long time, Belgian archaeology of the Roman period was dominated by intellectual discourses often rooted in colonial and ideological backgrounds, leaving little or no place for the agency of indigenous groups nor for the cultural diversity which developed under Rome's global umbrella. The contact of these societies with Rome was primarily seen as a one-way trajectory in which superior Roman culture was adopted or not adopted by native groups. Differences as reflected in material culture were very much viewed as culturally relevant levels of ‘romanisation’.

This idea was particularly prevalent in research into rural landscapes, which up till the early 1980s mainly focused on the study of vici, villae and related phenomena situated in the Belgian part of the fertile loess belt stretching from Picardy in northern France across central Belgium to the German Lower Rhineland. A picture emerged of a profoundly Romanised rural landscape crowded with villae, tumuli and some vici, and crowned by the presence of the municipium of Atuatuca Tungrorum. The western and northern part of the country, however, remained a vast terra incognita, notwithstanding early excavation work in the Saxon Shore fort of Oudenburg and two inventorying projects which mapped significant amounts of Roman-period material culture in the Waasland and coastal areas.

This unbalanced picture was partially adjusted in the early 1980s when excavations in the Antwerp and Kempen region in the northern part of Flanders revealed ‘native’ settlements consisting of post-built stable-houses. This research largely benefited from neighbouring work by Dutch colleagues working in the Maas-Demer-Scheldt area and the Dutch Kempen. They developed social anthropological interpretation models which allowed us to understand the regional diversity at work in the Romanisation process. Slofstra for instance emphasised the importance of clientship relations and dependent labour in understanding villa and non-villa modes of production, while Roymans stressed the importance of the force of old cultural traditions and the nature of the landscape, as well as the conservative nature of the pastoral societies inhabiting the sand landscapes.

In the late 1980s Vermeulen carried out an intensive field survey and some limited excavations in the region between the rivers Lys and Scheldt, south of Ghent, a micro-region situated in the civitas Menapiorum.