Limes and Legion - researching Roman life at the Lower Germanic Limes

Links to the project

• https://www.awk.nrw/limes-und-...

Limes and Legion - researching Roman life at the Lower Germanic Limes

The four Roman legionary bases in Bonn, Neuss, Xanten and Nijmegen still carry collective treasures of knowledge about the multifaceted life of the Romans on the Lower Rhine. The goal of a research team led by Bonn archaeologist Professor Jan Bemmann is to decipher these and preserve them for the next generation of researchers. The project operates at the exciting interface between state-of-the-art digital research and cultural preservation. It has excellent links with museums and the preservation of archaeological monuments; the Landesmuseum Bonn, for example, is one of the prominent cooperation partners. Legion camps, whose troops in the early imperial period still came from the Mediterranean heartlands, were a kind of microcosm of Rome. This can be seen well, for example, in the city-like military installations, the diet or even the imports. And even if research is not starting from scratch, a lot of things can only be guessed at so far.

Thanks to modern geophysical prospection methods and new possibilities of remote sensing, the legionary camps, which in older research were often regarded as islands, now appear as centers of a densely built and intensively used surrounding area. In addition, new scientific methods of analysis allow insights into the dietary habits, health or mobility of the inhabitants. The materials on the legionary camps and their surrounding area, obtained in over 150 years of collecting and excavation work, are now to be completely analyzed scientifically for the first time at the University of Bonn in cooperation with universities in Nijmegen and Munich.