“On a European scale, we have achieved a sensation”, said the National Institute for Archaeological Research (INRA) of the discovery, made at the site of a Merovingian settlement in Rollingen, near Mersch. So far, around 6,000 items have been found on site, although the excavation work is not yet complete. However, researchers have been able to establish a full picture of what life was like in the early Middle Ages in the area.
The excavation commenced in 2020 on Rue Bildchen. The INRA’s work has uncovered a Merovingian settlement which is not only unusual in its size and condition for Luxembourg, but for Europe as a whole. In comparison to many other archaeological digs around Europe, which are mostly based on tombs and individual objects, the Rollingen site allows people to analyse a full village from the Merovingian period for the first time, the INRA’s Cynthia Colling explains:
“This means we don’t just have small pieces, we can really grasp the whole structural organisation of the Merovingians here, so we can understand it better and really see how they lived, what they produced, if they traded with contacts in the region, and so on. We can also determine their social structure, the hierarchy and who was in charge of what.”
The excavations at the site, which have now been underway for six years, are only a fraction of the work. Around 70% of the archaeological work does not take place on the ground, but in the subsequent analysis, documentation, and evaluation of the objects before they are presented to the public.
In a joint statement issued by INRA and the culture ministry, the objects could not be kept where they were found due to their nature and the construction project planned. Their evaluation will therefore take place in documentation, scientific publications and communication to the general public.
Excavation technician Benedikt Zimmer says around 6,000 items have been found, including ceramic pieces, bones, grindstones, to material for making clothing.
“The special thing here is that we have a range of almost the full everyday life in Merovingian times, and we mostly only know these things through burial excavations, in that sort of context. In tombs you normally just find a selection of pieces, curated by the people left behind who decided what they wanted to bury with the dead. This is far from everything the person owned or used in life.”
Analysis has shown that people lived on the site for multiple centuries, from Roman times to the early Middle Ages. Due to the high complexity of the excavated items, the INRA team has had to use different methods during the dig, says director Anton Steger.
“There was an unclear situation in the rear area, where several discolourations ate into one another. After discussing with INRA we applied checkerboard patterns to a one-metre grid so we can slowly go down and try to differentiate between the findings, to better understand the situation.”
The Rollingen site was discovered through surveys conducted ahead of a construction project planned for Rue Bildchen. The discovery is therefore a direct result of preventative archaeology, which ensures building projects are subjected to analysis as part of the initial phase, to see if anything of archaeological interest is located in the ground.
The INRA hopes the excavation work will be concluded in the summer, which means the building project can finally commence.
