Das Uferkastell in Haltern und die römische Lippe

Ladies and gentlemen, in the reports about the Roman warehouses in Haltern, in the last few years, actually decades, there has never been a found site in the foreground, the so-called Uferkastelle on the floor of Hofestadt. The Uferkastelle is located about 400 meters south-east of the main camp, marked here on the foil with the yellow arrow. From 1901 to 1904, Friedrich Köpp uncovered four chronologically consecutive castles. At that time, large-scale excavations were still possible, because the entire settlement area, as you can see on the map, was not yet built, unlike today. The Uferkastelle is located in immediate proximity to a wide, landed lip arm, which the excavators could still see well in the terrain at the time. This proximity was also the reason for the claim as a Uferkastelle. Until the 1950s, a landowner, the so-called Burbrock-Gosse, brought so much water that children could bathe and catch fish there. The lip arm, which is shown in blue on the map, records the course of this Burbrock-Gosse. If you have ever visited the LWL Römer Museum in Haltern, you will probably also see the scale-appropriate model of the Uferkastelle. If you enter the exhibition space to the left, you will find the model in a wall showcase. The model shows the latest Uferkastelle, with its shipyards in the left castle area. Like the main camp, a massive wooden earthen wall protects the interior. Right at the foot of the marine base, the lip flows along. In these two pictures, please pay special attention to the Ufer fortification. The castle interior is separated from the river by a kind of quay. It consists of a high, stable fence with a board bridge behind it. This Ufer fortification represents the idealized deconstruction of quay lines, which exposed the head at the foot of the Uferkastelle, and which he interpreted as a Ufer fortification. Here you can see the most famous plan of the Uferkastelle, the colourful plan, at least that's what I call it, with the two oldest Uferkastellen. These are the ones in yellow and green, the yellow and green phases, in the right half of the picture. And with the two younger Uferkastellen, the red phase and the blue phase. The blue phase also includes the shipyards that are reconstructed on the model. All Roman finds go south, to the lower part of the picture, abruptly at the brown, slightly wavy line. This line marks a steep, over two metres high edge, where Köps ended the terraced terraces. The Uferkastelle was created in the 19th century by excavation, because the greenland in the Lippeaua, which leads south, the former Lippeau, was artificially elevated and wanted to make better use of it. The southern edge of the Uferkastelle was modernly destroyed in the 19th century. The question is, how far was it destroyed? In this very area, the red-covered area, we began our excavations in 2021, because new buildings were planned on the Uferkastelle 11 and 13. We have been examining the restoration of the yellow phase and the area north of it. As you can see, because of the 19th century excavations, almost nothing was left of the interior of the yellow phase. The mentioned Ufer fortification, Köps discovered when he laid a larger excavation area in the former Lippeau in the south of the yellow phase. He found hundreds of planks in the form of thick branches and thin crevices, pointed or not, partly upright in the moorland of the Lippeau, partly lying on the moorland. They were coarse branches, in the best case, crevices. All planks were pulled by the excavators and the well-preserved pieces were taken to the museum. Today, none of them are preserved. The worse ones remained on site and were torn apart within a few weeks or were buried again. I assume we did not discover these planks in the form of our survey. The planks formed linear structures in some places. Otherwise, they formed rather loose, unstructured ensembles. Although Köps also found the corresponding planks beyond the Ufer fortification, further west and further east, their extension, in his opinion, fit the Ufer fortifications so well that he dated them in Roman. Although he is always very careful with all interpretations and turns everything from left to right. The planks on the colorful plan are strongly idealized. You can see them marked with the yellow arrow. These dots for the red phase, the green phase, the blue phase, the yellow phase. They are also strongly supplemented and thus mislead regular planks with which the actual excavation site cannot be compared. In his excavation site in the Lippeau Köps also published this profile drawing in his excavation publication. This drawing shows the longitudinal section from the Ufer fortification to the Lippeau again, or to the old Lippeau. At first glance, it looks very clear. But if you blend out the supplementary lines from Köps, the following picture appears. He only covered the upper culture layer, which was applied in the 19th century, then the lower moor layer, the moor soil, and otherwise only a shaft a little further south, which also had to be covered with wood, because the groundwater was pushing up strongly. The planks are located directly under the filled soil. The planks are these three black lines that you see in the left half. The planks are located directly under the filled soil of the 19th century. They are embedded in a moor layer, in which there were also contemporary ceramic and brick pieces. A contemporary dating of the planks and an interpretation as pasture fences can hardly be doubted in light of this stratigraphic situation. Another reason for Köps to date the Ufer fortification in Roman were his findings within this deep excavation, the shaft that he laid. The moor soil is now shown in the upper area. One meter below that was a moor layer containing Roman finds. He explained the sequence in the following way. A Roman find in the moor layer equals a Roman river bed. Then the Ufer fortification as the border between the river bed and the Ufer castle. Accordingly, he came to his safe date, which we can now refute through our survey. Now a picture of the appearance of these planks. You can see that they are mostly unprocessed planks, rather coarsely pointed branches. And in the middle you can see the split poles, i.e. pieces of wood that would not be associated with Roman constructions in this way. Our geo-survey is located in the southern half of the excavation area. This is the only floor that has never been built on the Ufer castle. In summer 1922, Dr. Stefan Berke and his students from the University of Trier helped us with the construction. The geo-survey was 20 meters long, 6 meters wide and a maximum depth of 3.45 meters. Let's have a look. Here it is. In blue you can see the remains of Köpp's filled-in excavation area. On top of it, in a magnitude of 20, 40, 50 cm, depending, another layer of culture was piled up with finds from the 20th century. The area of Köpp's excavation area is enough for the bog layer in brown, but not below the bog layer below it. What is important for us now, above all, is the orange layer marked on the sole of our survey, the gravel layer we call it. It contains Roman found material, i.e. Roman shards, not rolled off. And, very importantly, from a geological point of view, it contains stones that would never have been transported from the water of the Lippe in this form, let alone via other routes, but stones that were originally in the original low terrace. And they can only have reached this level by the Lippe in the course of time, in the course of the centuries maybe, we cannot chronologically grasp that, successively dismantled this terrace, washed the sand towards the river, and the stones remained, including the shards that were on the terrace in Roman pits or on the Roman running horizon. That means, in the end, what Köpp interpreted as the Lippe bed is actually the rest of the terrace on which the shore castles lay, and which stretched much further south than could be seen so far. Here again an old overview plan by Köpp with the shore castles in red and their location on this spiky terrace, which reaches into the Lippe arm, and in yellow, which tries to mark how far the terrace could actually have reached originally. It could also have reached further south, but we cannot prove that yet. Here again the location of the shore fortification, which is located about 15 meters south of the terrace edge, and which was seen as the maximum extension of the yellow phase so far. According to our results, the terrace reached at least 10 meters beyond the shore fortification to the south, sketched here with a yellow line. We can take another 15 meters. No, that's 10 meters beyond the shore fortification. Nevertheless, at the present location, the inner surface of the castle of the yellow phase is only 900 square meters large, and thus still less than half of the younger castle. We still have a few meters beyond the property for geological drilling. Maybe we can then prove the terrace even further south. Otherwise, I have to talk to my colleague, Mr. Mühlenbrock, and tell him that the model has to be reworked in the Roman Museum. Thank you very much.