In the northern part of Vranjic, there is cut in the solid rock a Roman tombstone relief depicting a four-member family (Fig. 1). It has never been published, neither textually nor photographically since it is very poorly preserved. The relief is 58 cm in length and 40 cm in height. Structurally it consists of two parts: the upper field comprising the figures of the deceased, and the lower one where initially was the inscription (Fig. 1-2). Both the upper and the lower fields are cut in rock, the upper one at least twice deep as the lower one. As a whole, the relief is a transversally elongated rectangular, which poses questions of interpretation of the shape and possible patterns that it followed. In the pictorial field there are, right to left, four persons (Fig. 2). The persons at the ends are adults, whereas the two central ones are children. A logical conclusion is that they are members of a family: father, mother and their two children. Condition of the inscription prevents even the most serious attempts of reading it. It appears to have been organised in three lines, which becomes visible only when viewed at from aside and under dimmed light. It further appears it did not begin with the consecrative formula D(is) M(anibus). Although at the first sight the state of the relief provides no reliable chronological elements for its dating, it seems that the way of wearing the robe with its ends hanging over the shoulders, and the reduced semi-figural detail in presentation, support its dating from the last quarter of the 1st century AD onwards. If absence of dedication to the Manes is taken as another chronologically relevant detail, the dating can be further limited to the period from the last quarter of the 1st to the first quarter of the second century AD, the relief thus being dated at the end of the early principate. The relief of Vranjic is not the only example of tombstones in solid rocks in the Roman province of Dalmatia. In the coastal region alone, there are survived examples of such practice from Roski Waterfall on the Krka river, from Narona, Epidaurus and Bigeste, all of them dated into the early principate period. This phenomenon certainly deserves special researches and makes part of what is today known as the "landscape archaeology". What separates the relief of Vranjic from all other examples is its transversal shape, differing it from tituli, stelae and tabulae ansatae. A reason for such shaping is the form of the rock in which it is cut, that did not provide for a vertically elongated monument. However, it is not impossible that the relief reproduces shape of the monuments that were built into above-ground tombs, the mausoleums, like images (Fig. 3). The best insight into the genuine context of such relieves and all their possible forms is provided by the examples in the city of Rome and parts of the central and southern Italy, some of them still preserved in situ or that may be assumed their genuine location on edifices with large certainty (Fig. 4). The context in which the relief of Vranjic relates to the rock is partly, at least associatively, comparable with relations between the relieves built in architevture and the very architecture in which they stood.
