How archaeologists evaluate finds from old Kempten – Bavaria

The laser beam hits the top and bottom of the red pottery shard, the view of which now appears on a screen. Emilia Pfäffel rotates the shard a little, then fixes the image with a foot pedal. “The goal is to reconstruct an entire vessel from the shard,” says the student, and the so-called Laser Aided Profiler can do this much faster than by hand and with the help of a template. Based on the curvature of the shard, the computer determines the radius of the vessel to which the shard once belonged. The archaeologists can also reconstruct how steep the wall of the container must have been. In this way, an approximately 2000-year-old vessel that was used in Cambodunum, today’s Kempten, is virtually recreated.

During their excavations in autumn, the team led by Salvatore Ortisi, Professor of Provincial Roman Archeology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, not only found pottery, but also coins, glass, metal and precious stones in the Allgäu. Even old pollen is examined in the laboratory, which allows conclusions to be drawn about how the people in the oldest known German Roman town fed themselves – ultimately even what climate prevailed there around the time of Christ’s birth.

The excavations lasted six weeks. The archaeological “hard work”, as Sebastian Schmid calls it, is now taking place at the desk and in the laboratory in the Historicum in Munich. In the team he is responsible for the evaluation of the fine ceramics. The archaeologists want to find out how the Romans lived, how their trade routes worked, which cultures collided in Cambodunum – and how the Roman planned city came about in the first place, initially at about the same time as Trier and Cologne made of wood and then even as an ensemble of stone buildings. “Ultimately, it’s a detective game, that’s what makes it so exciting,” says Ortisi.

Kempten is so important as an excavation site because there is hardly anywhere else where the development of the areas north of the Alps by the Romans can be traced so well. The Romans planned Kempten on the drawing board as an administrative seat, where the governor probably also lived, where notaries and lawyers were based – so where the people from the province of Raetia had to go if they wanted to do their legal business. For the archaeologists, Cambodunum is also a stroke of luck because they find perfect conditions for their excavations: the Roman city was never built over, they don’t have to hope for construction projects like elsewhere to get to the deeper layers of the earth. The finds lie directly under the turf.

A 3D model from 5700 photos

Ortisi’s team is currently researching a very well-preserved, representative residential building with a private thermal bath and underfloor heating. Anja Reschmeier traced every single stone on the site by hand and created a 3D model on the PC from 5700 photos. The house was multi-storey, which can be seen from the strong foundations, among other things. With the help of architecture software, she wants to resurrect it. It is not only the large stones that are of interest to the scientists, but also the small finds: imported quartz sand next to a wood-burning stove, for example, suggests that glass was produced in Cambodunum very early on.

A small piece of fine ceramics, on the other hand, comes from Tuscany, which archaeologists recognize from its shape, among other things. It was probably delivered up to Kempten via Pisa and what is now France and Switzerland. Understanding something like that is what they call “backbreaking work” here. Assigning a year or a place of origin to coins, pottery, precious stones and small finds sometimes requires lengthy research in literature and databases, even for experts.

Open detailed view

Open detailed view

Sophie Hüdepohl, for example, is responsible for examining the small finds. First she sorts the pieces according to game pieces, ear spoons, i.e. a hygiene product, or gemstones. A red jasper is currently lying on her desk, depicting a hunting scene: a bitch chasing a hare. Hüdepohl has documented exactly where and in which layer of earth all these finds were discovered in the excavation field. “Ultimately, such an excavation is a destruction,” she says. “That’s why it’s important to be able to understand everything exactly.” In the office, she now draws all the finds, measures them, dates them and enters everything in a catalogue. For example, if the researchers discover a coin from the year 69 AD in a layer of earth, they know that everything in the layers of earth above it must be younger.

The finds are all stowed away in small bags, and a gray box also contains plastic bags with shards and other material with earth still stuck to it. They are sent off-site to the lab for chemical residue analysis. The bottoms of jugs are well suited for this, for example – this is how you can find out whether olive oil or wine was transported in an amphora. Fish sauce was also a popular import product, while cheese from the Allgäu was evidently already popular at the time and was shipped to what is now Italy. Archaeobotany, on the other hand, is located directly in the house. Thilo Kappelmeyer evaluates, among other things, plant remains that students have previously slurried from soil samples from the excavation site. Grain, for example, is a culture indicator, it reveals that people have cultivated crops. Remains of heather allow conclusions that the Romans cut down forest.

The Romans did not settle in bare primeval forest

Cambodunum was a meeting place for different cultures, the Roman administrative center also attracted Gauls and Germans, as well as Celts. They already had a fairly developed settlement system in the region, what archaeologists call “protourban cities.” “It’s not like the Romans settled in a bare jungle,” says Salvatore Ortisi. For Cambodunum, however, the Romans first leveled the ground completely, the settlement must have been planned down to the last detail. “You rarely see that as well as here,” says Ortisi.

In order to better understand these beginnings of the Roman settlement, the professor wants to concentrate on the early wooden buildings of the city during further excavations this year. “Because we can learn how a Roman city develops, what is built first, what was important.” It would help to get a better grasp of the Romans’ first attack north of the Alps. And according to Ortisi, this provides another important building block of how the Romans urbanized southern Germany in order to be able to better understand the cultural development of Bavaria.

So far, two city centers have been found during excavations, one of which the researchers assigned to the early phase of settlement. Until it turned out that this forum was younger than the oldest stone buildings. In this respect, the search for clues continues: Ortisi hopes to come across the original forum of the first Roman settlers of Cambodunum this year. So what did the center look like back then, was it also made of wood or were there already stone buildings? “I’m optimistic that we’ll find it soon,” says the professor of Roman provincial archaeology.