The Neupotz Find: The Site Location

The Neupotz Find

The Site Location

The location of the modern village of Neupotz is at the river Rhine on the eastern border of the Roman province of Gallia in 278 AD. During times of military weakness (like 259 - 260 and 268 AD) barbarian intruders raided deep inside Gallia. But the find had a coin of 277 AD from Lyon. We have no records of an intrusion in this time. Therefore this raid was a small scale operation in later times to resume the 'good memories' of the looting before. Konrad Weideman estimated the time to perhaps around 294 AD (p. 527). Considering the necessary fast escape with the wagon, the looted villa perhaps was in the 100 km range of the find.

Neupotz is very small and hard to find on maps. It is located in the northwest of the city of Karlsruhe, southwest Germany.

Detail map of the find area. The red cross marks the site of the main find from 1980 to 1983. It consisted of 625 pieces or about two thirds of the whole find. The hatched area is the site of the later third. The area is less then 500 m long. All belonged to one event but parts swimed downstream the river before they sunk.

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The area of the "Kieswerk Gebr. Kuhn", Neupotz. View from southwest (above) and southeast (below). The swim dredger is barely visible in operation in the lower part of the lake it created. It has been encircled in red. The b/w inserts show an operation sequence. Above, the open shovel is shown before it falls down to the ground. Below we see it after it has raised a full load of gravel, the water spilling out of small slits in the shovel. In such a way, the Neupotz find came up, too. Not exactly the way an archaeologist likes, but better than nothing at all. A preparation for a dry excavation was far beyond the archaeological budget. The area of the main find is marked with a red cross.

The right lake is brighter than the left one because its ground consists of gravel, while the ground of the left lake consists of darker mud.

The Rhine near Neupotz in a map by J. G. Tulla from ca. 1856 (north is right). The blue area is the old, wild river of a meander type. It was of slow speed, with a lot of side branches, river forests and some swamps. The Rhine changed its branches often and in an irregular way but always around the main track. This was the view the Romans had, too. In the mid of this track, two paralell lines marked the Rhine how Tulla wanted it.

The Rhine near Neupotz in a map by M. Honsell from 1885. This is after the "cultivation" of the Rhine by Tulla. It is now a fixed straight deep track. So the Rhine was changed to the largest industrial waterway in Europe. Now even ships of more than 1 m draft were able to use it without risk–an achievement by steam engines the Romans could only dream of. Most of the branches vanished in the the next years. The whole wide track of the older Rhine is a source for gravel mining now. One such gravel mining corporation is Kieswerk Gebr. Kuhn in Neupotz.

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