disiecta membra. Stone Architecture and Urbanism in Roman Germany

A catalog of Roman stone architecture, comprising 25,000 individual stones and 5,000 structures, to be made publicly available in a digital edition

Stone buildings from the Roman period can still be found in many parts of Germany. They bear witness to early urban life in this country – and sometimes to a checkered history. The ruins of Roman towns and buildings shaped the landscape in many places until the High Middle Ages, some of them serving as quarries for construction projects, such as the building of new city walls. When these walls were demolished, the Roman stones again re-emerged. Since 2023, these fragments, along with other pieces of Roman architecture, are being recorded and documented in a long-term project undertaken by the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz.

“The information we have collected on stone architecture and urbanism in Roman Germany is to be made freely and easily accessible for everyone,”

said Professor Johannes Lipps, project director acting on behalf of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). Other project partners include the Romano-Germanic Commission (RGK) in Frankfurt and the University of Marburg.

Long-term research project running for 24 years

The project has the Latin title “disiecta membra” – meaning “scattered fragments” – and it aims to collate some 25,000 individual building elements and 5,000 standing or still visible structures, such as Roman theaters. It will run for 24 years and will receive a total of EUR 9.5 million in funding.

“At JGU, we will focus on archaeological aspects. We are concerned with extant Roman stone structures and specifically with the many individual masonry elements that are a pars pro toto of buildings that have disappeared,” said Dr. Manuel Flecker, JGU research associate in the Academy project. “Over recent centuries, individual stones were often recovered and put into storage but were never subjected to detailed analysis.”

The Romano-Germanic Commission (RGK) in Frankfurt will assess earlier academic practices to understand how the documentation of Roman artifacts changed over the centuries and who were the people involved in this practice. The University of Marburg will prepare the online edition, whereby results will be transferred to existing databases with the help of a new digital infrastructure.

Over the first three years of the project, a team of researchers in Classical Archaeology at JGU will be collaborating with the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage in Rhineland-Palatinate (GDKE), the State Archaeology Directorate Mainz, and the Mainz State Museum to determine, among other things, the origins of the materials used to build Mogontiacum – the Roman foundation of modern Mainz – and sources of the various sandstone used.

“Their origin has hardly been studied and very little about the stone sources is known,”

added Thomas Heide, who is looking into this aspect. Manuel Flecker, on the other hand, is concerned with the earliest stone monuments of Roman Mainz dating back to the time of the Emperor Augustus. Among these is a so-called console geison – a cornice structure – that is stored in a GDKE repository. The carved stone is 1.5 meters long and 30 centimeters high and originally formed part of the top of an important tomb. At some point, the stone was used for another unknown purpose before it was incorporated in the foundations of the stage area of the Roman theater that was constructed in late antiquity.

“The stone is actually a high-quality, pale-colored limestone that was imported from Lorraine and a material frequently used for other types of stone structures,” specified Flecker, adding that stone structures were always painted originally, including tombstones.

The researchers will consider many different criteria, such as form, decoration, and style, to the examination of each stone and will try to date them as precisely as possible. Those that can be assigned close to a specific date – based on inscriptions – are a particularly helpful source that will facilitate further connection.

Various use cases and applications of the documented data

Three-dimensional reconstructions, photos, drawings, and descriptions provide information valuable to architectural and social history, building and urban research as well as provenance and network research. The data can support local monument preservation, provide residents with information on ancient structures in their local environment, provide academics with sources for further research, and give museums additional insight into their collections.

The large-scale online edition “disiecta membra. Stone Architecture and Urbanism in Roman Germany” is a long-term project undertaken by the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz under the aegis of the Academies’ Program of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities funded by the German federal and state governments.