Lampas - Volume 53, Issue 2, 2020

Summary For more than five hundred years the southern part of the Netherlands belonged to the Roman Empire, more particularly to the province of Germania inferior (Lower Germany). The left bank of the river Rhine served as the external boundary of this province, once the ambition to annex the Germanic territories across the river had been abandoned. Although the Lower German Limes is only a modest part of the wh Read More

Summary In the second century AD the Roman Empire reached its largest extent. By that time the military infrastructure at the periphery of the Empire stretched over thousands of kilometres, across the three continents surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Rome had to exert its power in very different climates and landscapes, and deal with external threats varying from the highly developed Parthian Empire to hardly orga Read More

Summary From the AD 40s onwards a dense Roman military system was established along the Oude Rijn in the Netherlands. It has long been questioned why this system was established in a wetland area, and how it went on to become the northwest frontier or limes of the Roman Empire. In order to shed new light on this longstanding historical debate a detailed paleogeographical map was constructed. From the informatio Read More

Summary In this contribution we first explain what is referred to as infrastructure in ancient times and how ancient authors looked at this phenomenon. We also describe the sources which we have to reconstruct the infrastructural networks in the period before and during the Roman expansion in this part of Northwestern Europe. The major part of this article addresses the questions of where and when the various for Read More

Summary During the early forties AD the Roman army built several timber auxiliary forts on the southern bank of the Lower Rhine. Remains of nine timber forts and a fortlet, sometimes well preserved, have been found in the western part of the Netherlands, in the Rhine delta: at Vechten (Bunnik), Utrecht, De Meern, Woerden, Bodegraven, Zwammerdam, Alphen aan den Rijn, Leiden-Roomburg and Valkenburg (South Holl Read More

Summary In the Late Roman period the Batavians disappeared from the written sources, and archaeologically speaking, nearly all rural settlements and cities of the Southern Netherlands ceased to exist, alongside the civilian centres. There is no good explanation for this depopulation but slight hints point to the population’s deportation. In the early 5th century several settlements were inhabited again. Judging by the style of the Read More

Summary The Roman period in the history of Nijmegen starts in 19 BC with the construction of a large military camp on the Hunerberg and ends with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. During this period of nearly 500 years the dynamic history of Nijmegen and the surrounding Batavian area was partly determined by well-considered decisions made by Roman emperors and their army commanders in the provin Read More

Summary This paper presents the current state of knowledge on food supply to the Roman Limes, vici and towns in the Netherlands – based on archaeobotanical and archaeozoological research – and the role of the local countryside. For the first century AD, several areas of origin for the food can be established. Cereals were imported, but also supplied from the regions adjacent to the Rhine; pulses and oil seeds may hav Read More

Summary The subject of this article is the interaction between the military and civilian communities in the Dutch Limes zone. Central questions are what influence the Roman army had on the civilian population, how the contacts between both groups were shaped, and how the individual soldiers interacted with civilians. The influence of the army was most prominent at the forts, but was also present outside the areas where the m Read More

Summary The forts and surrounding villages situated on the Lower German Limes were inhabited by people with very diverse ethno-cultural backgrounds. They came from all corners of the Roman Empire, and beyond, to the north-western frontier. In this article four case studies are put in the spotlight to illustrate the high rate of cultural diversity among these military communities.

Summary It is in the nature of the Dutch Limes, buried as it is under later river sediments and modern townscapes, that it is fundamentally invisible. Over the past fifteen years, a surge of local initiatives to create Roman references and replicas in our public spaces has gone a long way to make up for this. Many of these ‘emperor’s new clothes’ have been styled in a bold new language of ‘Dutch design’, giving a distinct imprint to Read More