Roman Harbours

When the Romans first began to develop their Germanic provinces, the Rhine with its tributaries was of immense importance as a transport route. Only via the Rhine was it possible to bring in enough materials, such as wood and stone, to build military and public installations. A suitable building material for constructing stone buildings was trachyte, a type of rock found at the Drachenfels in the Siebengebirge Hills. Its occurrence at Roman locations is not the only evidence we have that it was quarried. There are also relics of quarry activity at the Drachenfels hill itself. In order to load the quarried stones onto ships, there must have been at least one landing place at the foot of the Drachenfels, perhaps even a harbour, as was surely the case on the other bank of the Rhine in front of the legionary camp as well. The presumed harbours and the quarry at the Drachenfels will be researched under the auspices of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft's (German Research Foundation's) programme of selective measures called "Harbours from Roman Imperial times up to the Middle Ages". Comprehensive prospections and surveys have been planned for this, such as an Airborne-Laser scan, ram core drilling, determining the bathymetry using sediment sonar, geophysical measurements as well as divers for research purposes. This is a collaborative research project carried out by the Institute of Prehistorical and Early Historical Archaeology at the University of Bonn, the LVR-Amt für Bodendenkmalpflege (Department of Ground Monument Restoration) in the Rhineland, the Archaeology Department of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate, the Römisch-Germanisches Museum of the City of Cologne, and Museum Burg Linn, supported by the Institute of Geosciences at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel, among others.