Frederic Auth

And Nida lies in the Lemus region, so real frontier zone, not far from the actual Roman border, the Roman frontier to outside of the empire.

And Nida was, in Roman times, what we call a civitas capital.

So the Roman world was divided into provinces,

The province we are talking about is Upper Germany, Germania Superior.

The province capital was Mainz, not that far away from Frankfurt.

And the Kivitatis are administrative units within one province.

And Nida, the town, the Roman town of Nida, was the capital of such a territory.

Okay, so how many people at its peak are we talking?

And it's very close to the Rhine, right?

The other side of the Rhine was not the Roman Empire, for the most part.

For the most part, yes.

So we're talking about, difficult to estimate, but roughly 2,000 or 3,000 inhabitants at its biggest time.

So roughly talking second, late second, early third century, probably 2,000 or 3,000 people living there.

And so being in Frankfurt, essentially, this super expensive city to live in that is well built up, how on earth do you go about excavating ancient Roman sites somewhere like that?

Yes, that's actually quite the problem.

So we only know of the town of Nida in sort of patches.

So there are large building programs, of course.

It started in the 50s or 60s.

And now these buildings are all getting demolished.

Some of them getting demolished to make room for, well, essentially bigger buildings to live in.