Roman villas were the material expression of the social, political, cultural and economic system of the Roman Empire, but what happened in Western provinces when that system changed and collapsed?

How was the role of the new incomers? The fate of Roman villas requires a global and comparative approach to model the changes through a trans-national perspective. A new narrative needs to be crafted that will allow us to reframe the interpretation of Roman villas as a multilayered palimpsest of long-term biographies. This project places particular emphasis on such underexplored shift, by investigating re-use processes – the afterlife – of Roman villas in Gaul, Hispania and Italy. In-depth analysis of archaeological data offer will offer new insights on post-classical changes occurred during the “migration period” as paradigm of the long-term transition from the Roman world-system into Medieval Europe but also a new perspective for the archaeology of mobility and migration effects in breakdowns and resilience of complex societies.

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