Defensive infrastructure in the hinterland of the late Roman province of Germania Secunda hinged upon the widespread use of burgi. These defended settlements played a role in transforming villa estates, depopulated zones, and the expansion of the military footprint. They are common in the late third- and fourth-century landscape, spread throughout the loess belt of Belgium, Dutch Limburg, and the Rhineland, yet little has been done to quantify them. This article is dedicated to the chronology, morphology, and functional aspects of burgi, primarily in the loess plain of the Lower Rhine region. The author assembles data from a wide variety of burgi, to characterize them and reach meaningful conclusions about what they represent within the landscape, in the hope that it will act as a pilot project for future work in the field.

The end of the villa landscape in the north-western Roman provinces is characterized by significant transformation. One facet is the use of the villa complex and its surrounding area for funerary purposes. Traditionally, these burials have been divided into large-scale reuse of sites in the Migration period and small-scale transitional burials. The study of the latter has previously often been misguided or neglected. In this article, the author examines these transitional burials, addresses their historical background, and presents a new approach for assessing the scale, temporal distribution, and characteristics of a group of sites with funerary evidence in Belgica, Britannia, and the Germanic provinces.

In the last chapter of What Happened in History, Childe touched on the problematic of Late Antiquity. His pessimistic view of that period was a variation on the theme of decadence. This theme had existed in the Roman Republic and under the Empire, long before there was any Late Antiquity to be decadent. It then persisted throughout the Middle Ages and found monumental expression in Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Childe, however, took it to excessive lengths in his denunciation of the politics, economy, and culture of the Late Roman Empire. Childe based his arguments largely on the work of Rostovtzeff and Heichelheim. Both these eminent historians were exiles: Rostovtzeff from the Russia of the October Revolution and Heichelheim from National Socialist Germany. It is no belittlement to say that their work was influenced by the insights of their political experiences. Childe, however, did not appreciate this and adopted their thinking somewhat uncritically. He further added parallels between the Roman Period and his own time, which resulted in an unduly dark vision of the last phase of the Roman Empire.