Dedication digs ancient Roman town from German soil

Mainz / DPA

Archaeologist Daniel Markovic ascends from the dig in this ancient city on the river Rhine sweaty and covered in dirt. “I’m completely exhausted after a whole day of hacking, shovelling and carrying,” he says at the end of one of the hottest days in Germany this summer. Markovic has been exposing an ancient wall for scientific documentation.
The finds in the Old Town will be visible only briefly before being covered over by a new extension to the Romano-Germanic Central Museum, scheduled for completion by the end of 2019.
“My heart bleeds over this,” the 31-year-old archaeology student says. “I’ve been cleaning the wall for months and now it’s going to be demolished.”
Hans-Peter Kuhnen, another archaeologist in this city settled by the Romans in the first century BC, would also have liked at least some of the finds to be integrated into the new development. “But it’s a question of costs,” he acknowledges ruefully.
Thomas Dederer has assembled a team of between nine and 12 volunteers at any one time, many of them archaeology or history students, but also including language and sports students at the university, to dig down to a depth of up to three metres thus far.
“It feels special to be the first to see walls that disappeared underground hundreds of years ago,” says archaeology student Gabriele Thummerer, 22. There have been interesting discoveries since the beginning of the year, including fortifications dating back centuries that were unknown to historians and projectiles fired by a late mediaeval catapult.
Also uncovered were the remains of four mediaeval ovens for firing tiles, remains of one of the city’s gates, pottery shards and an early mediaeval buckle. Despite his disappointment, Markovic is clear that the dig serves a purpose. “You can only understand how authority functions today if you know how people organized themselves in the past,” he says.
He is particularly intrigued by the interaction of different cultures, for example that between the Romans and the Germanic peoples. “And for that I’m at the right place,” he says. Once he has done his work with the trowel and brush, specialists move in with precise positioning equipment to create scale drawings of all the finds.
The exact coordinates are recorded, and models can later be created using 3D techniques. “Once everything has been documented, at least the information is retained,” Markovic says. The dig will continue until February, and the aim is to go down as far as six metres in the hope of finding Roman artefacts, although groundwater pushing up under the influence of the nearby Rhine could cause problems.
The Mainz Gladius, also known as the Sword of Tiberius, was found nearby in 1848, although it is now in the British Museum in London, and some on the team are hoping for a find as dramatic as that. But Markovic is more interested in artefacts from everyday life that reveal the lives of ordinary people in centuries past. He finds the latrines intriguing, “even if that sounds rather unpleasant at first.”