Abstract

The Somogyszil cemetery became known in 1964, when a local resident reported the finds. The site was excavated by Balázs Draveczky, who uncovered 148 late Roman burials until 1968. The cemetery was fully published by Alice Sz. Burger in 1979. We began the critical re-assessment of the cemetery and its finds in 2015 as part of a research project “Power and culture in the Carpathian Basin in the early Middle Ages” involving in part a fresh look at the late Roman cemeteries in southern Pannonia. Our research agenda focuses on the spatial organisation of the burial grounds used by the province’s rural population as well as on burial customs (funerary rites, grave and burial types), chronology and the mapping of local and non-local tendencies. During the critical re-assessment of the cemetery, we found that the establishment and use of this late Roman burial ground could be linked to a heterogeneous community.