West Germania in Transition

West Germania in Transition - Edition and multidisciplinary study of the north-west German cultural landscape during the Roman Iron Age (1st-4th century AD)

The north-western part of the Germania magna offers a fascinating opportunity to conduct a multidisciplinary study of the social and economic development of ‘Germanic’ societies that lived in close proximity to and in mutual exchange with the Roman Empire during the first half of the 1st millennium AD. Numerous large-scale excavation projects over the past decades in Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Bremen have yielded findings that have scarcely been published to date. The project is dedicated to editing these extensive sources and producing a new comprehensive synthesis of the cultural interaction between the border-area gentes and the Roman Empire. For the first time, sources relating to the environment and economy, settlement patterns, as well as social development, will be analysed holistically over a period of 500 years through archaeology, archaeobiology, mining archaeology, archaeometallurgy, history and geoinformatics.

Interacademic project of:
Niedersächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen
Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Küste, Düsseldorf

Project management:
Prof. Dr. Lorenz Rahmstorf (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) 
Prof. Dr. Thomas Stöllner (Ruhr Universität Bochum)

Cooperation partner:
Niedersächsisches Institut für historische Küstenforschung, Wilhelmshaven
Deutsches Bergbaumuseum Bochum

Duration: 2026-2043; 18 Jahre