2,000 years ago someone screwed up in a foundry. Thanks to her we have discovered a Roman workshop hidden in Germany

When a piece of metal goes wrong, the normal thing in an artisan workshop is that it ends up being discarded. Well, something like this must have happened 2,000 years ago and that chance discovery of a lead ingot at an excavation in Rothaargebirgein the German region of Sauerland, has helped discover, understand and reconstruct how this metal was produced in the Roman Empire.

The discovery. It all started with a large cast lead ingot, with a characteristic workmanship from the Roman imperial period, which found Brilon resident and metal prospector Peter Hoffman. Then he notified the authorities: the ingot was not a unit lost in transit, but a casting failure that was probably left there with the idea of ​​remelting it to use it, something that fortunately (for archaeology) never happened.

With that clue, the archeology team of the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association (LWL) The excavation campaign began in June on an elevation of the Rothaargebirge massif, near Brilon. What they found there confirmed his suspicions: There was a lead processing area from Roman times, something unique until now in southwest Westphalia.

Why is it important. It may not be as spectacular as tombs or treasures, but this defective lead ingot serves to fill a gap in history: it is the first solid archaeological evidence that a metallurgical production chain existed in Sauerland, something that until now was not known. This is how he fills in a piece to better explain how the Roman economy worked.

Furthermore, since ingots are direct products of mining and are marked with seals or engravings, they allow their distribution chain to be traced: the place of origin (the manufacturing workshop is close to the mine), their trade and distribution networks. In fact, there is a corpus which brings together some 2,250 Roman ingots documented from Scotland to Morocco and from Portugal to Israel.

Context. As explains the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochumlead was a metal widely used in Roman times for all kinds of things: pipes, weights, sling projectiles or sarcophagus linings… and sometimes it was linked to the extraction of silver, so it is common to find the production of both together. Precisely this relationship between lead and silver is essential to explain Brilon.

According to the doctor in archeology of the LWL Manuel Zeilerrelatively small amounts of lead were found at the site, which suggests that the objective was to produce lead efficiently and not generate waste derived from silver exploitation, an important detail because in many ancient sites both activities go hand in hand. Previous works by LWL already indicated that in the area around Brilon there were deposits rich in mineral and that Roman metallurgists had visited the area with the interest of obtaining lead, but it was not clear how.

In detail. The team, led by Sebastian Magnus Sonntag, documented that there were ceramic fragments of pre-Roman tradition and numerous small fragments of lead related to the process of obtaining the metal, in addition to a base built with carefully arranged stone slabs.

Both these slabs and the clay soil beneath showed signs of fire and heat and in the gaps between stones there were remains of charcoal, still to be analyzed, but the team’s hypothesis points because that place was a roasting point: there the galena (the most common lead sulfide in the region) was heated along with charcoal to reduce its sulfur content and then melt the resulting metal and pour it into molds and obtain ingots like the one found.

Yes, but. The excavation only lasted a couple of weeks and the conclusions are still preliminary, but there are some things that still do not add up: the ceramic fragments probably point to the beginning of the Roman imperial era, but it is a relative and not an absolute dating. The key will be in the dating of the vegetal carbon remains. But the big underlying question was who worked the metal there: whether they were Romans, Germans or local artisans in contact with Roman technology.

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Cover | LWL and Jebulon