Extra: Was there human sacrifice in ancient Rome?

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea 13 min 2 speakers 4 chapters transcribed 3 months ago

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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

Jonathan McCrea 0:01

Future Proof Extra. With Jonathan McRae. Proudly supported by Research Ireland. On Newstalk.

Frederic Auth 0:08

Now, if you've ever been to Italy or indeed anywhere on the Mediterranean coast, you'll probably know there is no shortage of evidence of the ancient Roman civilization. They were everywhere. What is less clear about what happened is on those edges, on the frontiers, how they lived and how cultures intertwined with each other as the Roman Empire prevailed. overlapped with other territories like the Gauls and the Germanic tribes.

What evidence of ancient Roman civilization exists in modern-day Frankfurt?

Frederic Auth 0:33

Our next guest is going to tell us all about that because he's working on a site just on one of these edges. His name is Frederick Outt. He's a doctoral researcher at Goethe Universitat in Frankfurt. Welcome to the program, Frederick. How are you? I'm fine. Thank you for having me. Tell me a little bit about this site, Nita, with a bit of context beforehand, maybe, as to what was going on, where it is, and from a geographical point of view, why it's of particular interest when we think about the Roman Empire of sort of the first couple of centuries A.D. ? Yeah, sure. So Nida is what today is part of Frankfurt, the city of Frankfurt. So we are on the east bank of the Rhine, in the Rhine-Main area. Today is Hessen, the state of Hessen.

Frederic Auth 1:20

And this is frontier zone. So the Roman Empire... stretched through large parts of Western Europe, and especially the Rhine area. 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?

Frederic Auth 2:18

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.

Frederic Auth 3:14

Some of them getting demolished to make room for, well, essentially bigger buildings to live in. Because Frankfurt is, I think, the second... most expensive town in Germany to live in. And each time one of those buildings is being torn down, well, the archaeologists get the chance to look under it. And in this case, we were particularly lucky that those buildings sometimes do not have a basement, so there's still a lot intact to research on.

Why is the site of Nida significant in the context of the Roman Empire?

Frederic Auth 3:44

Right, just out of interest, if a building's taken down, do archaeologists always get a first chance to explore before you build on it? Is that sort of a default in Frankfurt because of NIDA? Yeah, well, essentially, yes, yeah. Okay, so this building that was demolished revealed something really unusual, a sanctuary. And there's some very interesting distinguishing parts about this find. So once the building's gone, what do you do and what did you find in this particular site? So in this case was a large school building being demolished. So fairly large site, we're talking four and a half thousand square meters here. Wow. And, yeah, when the building was turned down, it was pretty clear that there was something under there because we are in the center of the Roman nida.

Frederic Auth 4:34

So, it's fairly obvious that we have to expect some archaeology there. And you would normally find, like, the center of administration there, sort of administration buildings?