INTRIDUCTION

The Archaeological Park of the Roman villa at Borg is situated in a wooded area between the modern villages of Borg and Oberleuken in the German Bundesland Saarland, close to the point where the present-day borders of Germany, France and Luxembourg meet (fig. 1). The villa stands on the fertile limestone soils (Muschelkalk) of the Saar-Mosel-Gau between the rivers Moselle and Saar. This site was directly adjacent to the important Roman road between the civitas capitals of Augusta Treverorum/Trier and Divodurum Metromatricorum/Metz. Constructed in the Augustan period, this road was part of the long-distance link between Cologne and Lyon. A road settlement is known at ‘Auf Schiffels’, about 300 m to the north of the gate that gave access to the villa complex. As recent excavations have shown, it consisted of a road station (mansio) and several auxiliary buildings.

Although most of what we presently know about the villa is the result of archaeological fieldwork carried out during the past twenty-five years, research at the villa actually began around 1900, when Johann Schneider, a local teacher from nearby Oberleuken, first discovered traces of a Roman settlement and carried out the first small-scale excavations. After these initial explorations, the site sank into oblivion until it was rediscovered in the early 1980s. The Kulturstiftung Merzig-Wadern, in close cooperation with the Landesdenkmalamt des Saarlandes, the Arbeitsamt and the municipality of Perl, started large-scale excavations in 1987 when the site became seriously threatened by the clandestine excavations of treasure hunters. The excavations showed that the villa is an example of the axial type, with a clear distinction between a residential area (pars urbana) and a working area (pars rustica) (fig. 2). Over the past two and half decades, attention has concentrated on the residential area, which is now almost fully excavated. With a total surface area of 7.5 hectares, the villa is certainly one of the biggest in the Saar-Mosel region.

The villa of Borg stands out for its rather exceptional preservation conditions. In some places, the walls of the building were still standing up to a height of 1.80 m! This was largely because the site was abandoned after the end of Roman occupation in the 5th century; it gradually reverted to woodland and has not been used for agricultural purposes ever since.