The Journey of the Tour of Roman Bonn
From the Hidden Remains to the Website
The city of Bonn is perhaps best known for two things: the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany and the birthplace of Beethoven. Yet Bonn has a far deeper history. Many people do not realize that it was also a strategic military outpost of the Roman army two thousand years ago. Due to the development and growth of the city, most of the remains of its Roman past are not visible to outsiders, hidden under the earth, or insufficiently signposted or contextualised due to a lack of information boards. However, due to the passion and hard work of a team of researchers at the Bonn Center for Dependency Studies, the rich Roman history of Bonn is now widely accessible.
Our team comprises researchers from the University of Bonn, including Giulia Cappucci (BCDSS PhD student), Maja Keller (BCDSS PhD student), James Harland (BCDSS Postdoctoral Researcher), and Julia Hillner (BCDSS Professor).
Our goal was to make the rich Roman history of the place where we are carrying out our research on this very period of history more visible. Not only did we wish to deepen our understanding of the local events of the ancient past, the mingling of the local population with the joined-up Romans, and the development of the settlement, but we also wanted to fulfill our scientific mandate: to bring science into society.
Remains of a Roman architectural element. The round-arched windows are filled with a piece of bronze artwork depicting Christian motifs. It is located in the centre of the city next to Bonn Minster and may have once belonged to a pagan sanctuary (Photo by the author).
From the walking tour to the website
The whole project started with a guided tour of Roman Bonn. The tour is offered to all members of the BCDSS, as well as fellows, visiting scholars, researchers from other institutes of the university and other interested people, but particularly to incoming students of the Master's program. For this reason, the well-frequented tours usually take place at the beginning of each semester. They are as well conducted in English to serve the international environment of the Center and the University. Lasting three hours or more, the convivial venture begins at the Roman street with replicas of tombs and votive stones in the Rheinaue park in the south, and concludes at the legionary camp in the north of the city.
From left to right: Maja Keller (née Baum), Prof. Julia Hillner, Giulia Cappucci on the Tour of Roman Bonn May 2024 (Photo by the BCDSS public relations team).
To bring the Roman past of Bonn to the attention of even more people and to make our acquired knowledge publicly accessible, the idea of the ‘World of Roman Bonn’ website came up.
A website seemed the ideal means to provide a wider audience with the vast amount of information collected in the research process and, at the same time, make the users able to access and use that information more independently and create their own tour of the Roman Bonn.
To begin, the team compiled the information that had already been used for the tour. As all team members are quite busy as full-time academics involved in teaching, collaborative projects as well as their own research, it wasn't easy finding a date for a joint meeting to get the project off the ground. And we could not have succeeded without the generous support of the public relations team at the BCDSS. The PR team was also involved from the very beginning, Without Buğra N. Duman's IT skills the website would never have become as multifaceted and thorough as it is now.
Visualization and structure
In order to make the website visit more entertaining and user-friendly, we used various forms of visualization. In the 'Historical overview' section, readers can find detailed information about Roman expansion in the Rhineland and the demarcation of the river Rhine. The main section is divided into various chapters that discuss social conditions, both in the military sphere and among the local and immigrant civilian population. A table concisely outlines the historical events. Images support the visualization of the past or depict the tomb and dedication stones, whose transcriptions and translations are provided at the bottom of the page. In addition, internal links offer the possibility of connecting content throughout the website while external links provide further reading material. We have also added a selected bibliography for readers interested in delving deeper into the presented topics. At the end of the main page, the personal cards introduce the members of the team to the reader, who can further discover their individual projects at the BCDSS through internal links.
Screenshot ‘World of Roman Bonn’-Website (26 August 2024). Interactive map.
The interactive street map, in which numerous places with traces of Roman history in the city of Bonn are marked, is a feature we would like to highlight. If you click on the markers, a small info box appears. You can find out even more about the respective location by clicking on a link, which opens a new tab with further information and images. Many of the images were taken directly on site. This feature allows users to access the Bonn's Roman past when walking through the city and easily verify if they are in the correct location.
Interested readers, including international visitors, can now explore the city on site and discover local history on the spot. The content of the website provides the necessary historical context to understand the historical relationships and developments in a profound and in-depth way.
Press release video produced by Buğra N. Duman.
Sharing our thoughts: "What was your experience working on the Tour of the Roman Bonn?"
Giulia:
„If you ask me to describe what the Roman Bonn tour has meant to me, the first definition that comes to my mind is a challenging opportunity. The project started when I had just moved to Bonn from Italy, and I first saw my involvement in it as a chance to know more about the town's history, and also broaden my scholarly perspective on the Roman past. Despite being an archaeologist specialized in the Roman Imperial Period and Latin Epigraphy, my studies had always focused on the city of Rome. Thus, the knowledge of events involving an important military yet peripherical site like Bonn (or Bonna, as the Romans called it) was scarce. Therefore, the first step was to delve into the ancient history of the city and its archaeological remains in books and articles.
This research also implied shifting my perspective from Rome, the center of the empire, to the provinces: I started my personal journey from the Urbs to Bonna, where different actors and dynamics were at play.
Along the Roman northern frontier, the pervasive military element stood out but was also surrounded by local people and immigrants from other parts of the empire, who lived and worked in close connection with the legionary fort. In this context, the themes of conquest, exploitation, complex forms of integration into Roman society, and resistance were deeply intertwined.
Votive stone as an example of local and Roman religious practices placed by slaves of the local commander (Photo by the BCDSS PR-Team).
After studying in the library, I also needed some “field work” to combine the notions acquired from the bibliographical research with the current topography of the city, the locations of the ancient remains, and the traces left by the ancient inhabitants …in the end, it would be a walking tour!
A preliminary excursion of the team a few months before the first official tour played a fundamental role and allowed me to become more familiar with the city, discovering hidden sites such as the Roman Baths beneath the Collegium Albertinum and beginning to figure the ancient landscape out.
On that occasion, the team also began its work: I remember we planned the tour structure and assigned each member a specific topic to deal with at a pub table, in front of a beer, which is always a good start. Since then, our coordination and cooperation have undoubtedly improved, despite our busy schedule, thanks to everyone’s effort and commitment.
However, this journey was not without difficulties. The major challenge I faced was communicating the research results to an audience with different academic backgrounds and historical knowledge, like the BCDSS members and fellows. Therefore, the presentation had to be clear and engaging, introducing topics such as Romanization or ancient slavery in a way that non-specialists would easily understand without concealing their complexity.
The life of Roman Bonn and its archaeological remains (from a tombstone to a fresco or a suspensura in the baths) had to be placed in the broader context of Roman imperial history and social history as exhaustively as possible.
This task can be extremely difficult for researchers like me, who have always talked to other fellow students or professors in the same field of study. However, transmitting the developments in the research to a wider non-specialist audience is a challenge from which scholars cannot shy away.
Knowledge only progresses and makes a difference when it becomes accessible and shared beyond our separate and small academic circles.
In this respect, the tour has been my test bed. Every time, I aim to convey not only the notions acquired over the years but also my critical observations and the passion behind my studies, paying attention to the audience’s reactions and trying to arouse their interest.
This approach has borne fruit despite my initial anxiety: an altar or a tombstone description has often led to compelling exchanges of ideas and discussions, historical comparisons, and in-depth remarks that brought to the fore aspects of Roman reality I had overlooked.
The website project partly stems from the same perspective: our team needed a platform from which the story we wanted to tell could reach more people independently from the tour. This aim led us to broaden our research further and include sites not touched by the walking tour, delineating even a more complete and multifaceted picture of the area in Roman times.“
Maja:
„Developing the tour and website of Roman was a very varied and complex project. As I offer a guided tour in German, I was already quite familiar with the content and concept of a guided tour. However, it was new for me to conduct the tour in a foreign language.
Nevertheless, it is particularly interesting - and at the same time obvious - that a globally spoken language such as English allows you to address people who have not only different cultural but also historical backgrounds.
We had to consider the fact that some participants were unfamiliar with Western Europe's ancient past, which is often not taken into account when studying history at a German universities and which is often taken for granted (keyword 'Eurocentrism'!).
However, since working with an international group of colleagues, students and fellows at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies and guiding them through the local German past made me increasingly aware of this topic.“
The cult of the Matronae, which spread throughout the Rhineland, awakens a fascination in me. The local religions of Germanic and Celtic peoples first became visible to us today through Roman epigraphy and Latin letters. There are a few people who still offer them symbolic sacrifices today (Photo by the author).
We and the entire team are proud to have created such a detailed and well-executed website. The project not only allowed us to gain a lot of knowledge for our research and to grow on a personal level, but also to feel part of a research community that was given the opportunity to realize its purpose of communicating what science has to offer.