A blue glass Roman bowl has been discovered in a spectacular state of preservation by archaeologists carrying out preventive excavations at a housing site in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. It could be 1,800 years old.
The bowl discovered among tombs and remains of Roman habitation will probably join a museum.
Not a crack, not a chip, despite two millennia or so spent underground. A magnificent blue glass bowl produced during the Roman Empire has been unearthed intact during preventive excavations carried out on a large construction site intended for the construction of housing and green spaces, in the Winkelsteeg district of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. Down. Glass pieces of this age - here, at least 1,800 years old - and in such a state of preservation are extremely rare.
Municipium
Nijmegen, from the Latin Noviomagus, which means "new market", is one of the oldest cities in the country. Located on the banks of the Waal, a tributary of the Rhine in the "Great Rivers" region, just ten kilometers from the German border, it was originally a Roman military camp in the 1st century BC. , before the Batavians, a Germanic people established at the mouth of the Rhine, came to settle there. The "colony" of Nijmegen was, in 98 CE, the first town in the present-day Netherlands to receive the status of a municipality, or municipium , which makes a city outside Italy part of the Empire. In this, its inhabitants had Roman citizenship and the right to vote, although the city still enjoyed a certain administrative autonomy.
It is therefore not surprising to find such an object there, whose function must have been limited to pageantry. "This bowl was once an exhibit for the first inhabitants of Nijmegen" , said in the regional newspaper De Stentor the director of the excavations, Pepijn van de Geer, archaeologist in the service of the city of Nijmegen. "I don't know of any other such well-preserved Roman glass pieces, certainly not in the Netherlands" , he assures, this time in a video posted online by the archaeological service of the city.
A German production?
The bowl could have been made in the large German cities of Xanten or Cologne, where glass-making workshops were located at the time. Pepijn van de Geer also does not rule out the possibility that it was made in Italy. “These dishes were made by letting the molten glass cool and harden on a mold. The striped pattern was drawn when the glass mixture was still liquid. As for its blue color, it is due to the metal oxide. "
The excavations at Winkelsteeg have also brought to light Roman tombs as well as some funerary objects such as numerous vessels, cups and jewellery. The remains of dwellings are few - the archaeologists found mainly traces of wooden construction - but the study of the residues and the discoloration of the soil could make it possible to know more about the structures which at the time drew the neighborhood.