Novaesium

Novaesium
Ground plan of the stone-built 'Koenenlager' Roman legionary fortress. The plan is from Koenen's excavations of 1887-1900.
Novaesium is now within the city of Neuss, on the left bank of the Rhine, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Type	Multiple legionary camps and fortress
Founded	16 BC or earlier
Abandoned	4th century CE
Attested by	Tacitus, Antonine Itinerary, Tabula Peutingeriana
Place in the Roman world
Province	Germania Inferior
Limes	Lower Germanic Limes
Nearby water	Rhine
Directly connected to	Cologne/Trier and Xanten/the North Sea
Structure
— stone structure —
Built during the reign of	Claudius
Built	mid-1st century
Size and area	570 m × 420 m (25 ha)
Shape	Oblong
— timber structure —
Built during the reign of	Augustus, Tiberius
Built	16BC to AD 43
Shape	Multiple overlapping polygonal camps of varying sizes
Construction technique	earth and wood
Stationed military units
— Legions —
XX Valeria victrix, XVI Gallica, VI victrix, and others.
— Alae —
Possibly Afrorum veterana from AD 100
Location
Coordinates	51°11′02″N 6°43′19″E / 51.183889°N 6.721944°E / 51.183889; 6.721944
Place name	Gnadental
Town	Neuss
State	North Rhine-Westphalia
Country	Germany
Reference
UNESCO	List 1631, inscribed in 2021[1] Listed monument BD 04/06[2]
Site notes
Recognition	UNESCO World Heritage Site
Discovery year	1886
Condition	Entirely below ground, mostly now built over.
Excavation dates	1887-1900, 1953-1980
Archaeologists	Constantin Koenen (1854-1929), Gustav Müller (1921-1988), Michael Gechter (1946-2018)
Website	www.novaesium.de/ (in German)

Novaesium was the name the Romans used for the successive legionary camps and fortress at what is now the city of Neuss, on the west bank of the Rhine, in Germany. The earliest occupations, dating from the late 1st century BC to the early 1st century AD, were a succession of earth and timber camps with the legionaries living in tents. In around AD 43, a large legionary fortress was begun, which was progressively fortified with stone walls, gates, and turrets, along with more permanent barracks, officers' quarters and administrative buildings. As the Romans abandoned an expectation of a continually expanding empire the fortress became a permanent structure, and helped to create the Limes, limits of the Roman Empire, along this stretch of the Rhine Valley. The fortress was made smaller in the early 2nd century but remained an auxiliary base which helped define and defend the north-eastern limits of the Roman Empire for a further 200 years.

The foundations of the stone fortress were discovered by Constantin Koenen in the late 19th century. When excavated it was the first complete ground plan of a legionary fortress and came to epitomise the 'playing card' style Claudian era fortress. Further excavations in the 1950s to 1980s revealed progressively more complex precursor camps to the west of Koenen's excavations, leaving a chronology and terminology which remains to some extent unresolved. The whole site was developed for housing as the excavations progressed, limiting the scope for subsequent discovery or clarification. In 2021 the lower Rhine fortifications were inscribed as the Lower Germanic Limes UNESCO World Heritage Site, a series of 102 locations from south of Bonn (Germany) to the North Sea coast (the Netherlands).