Roman Cologne

I am currently preparing a day school on Roman and Frankish Cologne, or Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium for an English beginners audience. This is traditionally quite easy, there are numerous books on Roman Cologne, written in the aftermath of the excavations of the post-war years and in the years after the opening of the Römisch-Germanisches Museum in Cologne in 1974. There is just one problem - most of them are in German and to judge from the English language Wikipedia pages (eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_Claudia_Ara_Agrippinensium), there is a presumption that this has not really needed updating.

However, in the 2000s COlogne invested heavily in a new underground line that crossed the entirety of the historical city and led to some of the largest scale excavations in Germany, both in depth (up to 14m down and in size, one publication speaking of over 100 football fields of intensive excavation).

This happened in addition to an archaeology department in the University of Cologne that encouraged students into working with the huge amounts of legacy material available in the Cologne Museum as well as the publication of the Cathedral excavations from the 1960s.

The result: we now have a much more differentiated picture of Roman and Frankish Cologne. More differentiated, as we better understand some of the public buildings, the fact that we have a near complete image of the waterfront along the first-century harbour. More differentiated, as we begin to understand that Cologne, as so many well excavated Roman cities does not easily fit in pre-conceived structures of development of 'The Ancient City', but is idiosyncratic and surprising. Beginning with very early Roman military installations close to the Cologne Hauptbahnhof to the vast extent of the suburban settlements, whose size of over 20 ha each dwarf the size of many of the civitas capitals of Roman Britain and whose industrial character underlines the economic importance of the city - more than its public buildings can.

So, how to offer this to the English speaking audience? Frankly with great difficulty. The literature is vast, but in view of the fact that time is limited and the learning of the German language (as Mark Twain observed) demanding a substantial amount of time, I came to the conclusion that I had to work with some help.

I found two books particularly helpful -  One is the book accompanying the 2012 exhibition on the finds from the excavations for the Underground line mentioned above. It is called ZeitTunnel. 2000 Jahre Köln im Spiegel der U-Bahn Archäologie by Markus Trier and Friederike Naumann-Steckner (2012). The texts are short and easily scanned and introduced to Google Translate, which is producing on the whole understandable translations.

The second one is Thomas Fischer and Marcus Trier. Roman Cologne. The Historical City Guide (2014). It is not a walking guide, it has a list of the sites worth visiting in the back, but this is a well written coherent account of the history and archaeology of Cologne from its beginnings to the 6/7th century Frankish remains. (and very handily is also available as an ebook, as well as a paper volume, so less to carry), it makes for great reading BEFORE you get to  Cologne (or before you need to hand that term paper in :-)).  Everything is in one place, and unlike a lot of guides that cover the area inside the city wall and the churches, this is actually taking in the territory of the city as well. So you get good summaries of the suburbia, of the cemetery areas, but also of the villae rusticae surrounding the colonia. If your German is up to it, there is further reading in the back of the book and it really has beautiful photographs and very helpful maps.