Vatican Museums

The most ancient tombs, which date from the end of the first century D.C., provide evidence of the practice of cremation. They were distributed over the Vatican hill at various levels of the slopes, where there was ample opportunity to occupy the burial sites considered most suitable.
Taking an overall view of the Necropolis, the collective tombs would have been the most evident, although they were destined for a limited number of burials; often these tombs contained a family or at most a limited family group. They are small tombs, of various shapes, and they all contain slots for housing individual cinerary urns in the walls and the floors. Another type of collective tomb was the walled enclosure, in which the urns were housed in the walls, which surrounded an open-roofed central area.
The necropolis of the Via Triumphalis also included many individual tombs. The most numerous consisted of urns scattered here and there in the ground, often covered by amphorae. This type of burial could be accompanied by funerary stelae fixed into the ground, but the most humble were without any form of distinctive sign. The ashes of the deceased could be laid in altar are-urns, or rather small stone monuments in the shape of an altar and complete with a dedication, which stood out among the stone buildings.
This is how the landscape of the Necropolis would have appeared in the period between the end of the first century B.C. and the end of the first century A.D.