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oa De Romeinse Limes in Nederland
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Lampas, Volume 53, Issue 2, Jun 2020, p. 113 - 123
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Abstract
For more than five hundred years the southern part of the Netherlands belonged to the Roman Empire, more particularly to the province of Germania inferior (Lower Germany). The left bank of the river Rhine served as the external boundary of this province, once the ambition to annex the Germanic territories across the river had been abandoned. Although the Lower German Limes is only a modest part of the whole frontier system of the Roman Empire, it can boast of various distinctive characteristics, the most important of which is the outstanding preservation of timber buildings, ships and other organic remains in the water-logged conditions of the Rhine delta. This paper presents a brief history of this frontier section and addresses a few general issues, as an introduction to a series of papers discussing a variety of aspects of the frontier and of life in a frontier zone.