My main field of interest are the northwestern provinces of the Roman empire. Since I was trained in classics as well as archaeology, I have always had a strong interest in Latin epigraphy. In most of my work, I try to combine archaeological, historical as well as epigraphic evidence.
My doctoral dissertation (1998) was about religious change in Roman Gaul, a topic that continues to have my interest. My recent work in this field has focused on the material dimensions of rituals of the human life course. More broadly, I am also interested in other areas of identity construction, particularly those generated by the Roman army. I have been working on seal-boxes and the latinization of the Lower Rhine frontier area, on constructs of ethnic identity in inscriptions of Batavian and other auxiliary soldiers, and on combs and bodily appearance of Roman army soldiers.
In the recent past I co-directed with my colleague prof. N. Roymans two NWO-financed research projects on Roman villa landscapes in the North: economy, culture, life-styles (2006-2010) and on the The villa of Hoogeloon and the settlement at Riethoven. Key sites in the Roman rural landscape of the Lower Rhine frontier zone between limes and loess (2010-2014), the main results of which are available in two volumes in the series Amsterdam Archaeological Studies.
