Wederath - Vicus

The Roman street settlement of  Belginum is situated on a plateau typical of the Hunsruck region and ideally suited for development.
The plateau, only a few kilometres wide, was perfectly suited for construction of a street. Belginum grew up about 600 metres to the west of the large grave field that lay alongside the old Roman road that passed from Treves to Mainz.
Today the eastern end of the site is marked by a medieval tower known as the ‘Stumpfer Turm’. The western end is situated roughly where the road branches off to Bernkastel-Kues.
A dedicatory inscription names the place, also referred to in ancient street registers, as Belginum. 
The inscription informs us that the inhabitantsof Belginum – the vicani Belginates – erected, under the guidance of an official, a votive stone to Epona, the tutelary goddess of the carters and their horses and oxen.
Trough - like recesses provide information on the layout of the Roman development that lay on both sides of the Hunsrück mountain road. They are the remains of former cellars. The number and systematic location of the cellars suggest a total of somewhere between 70 and 90 housing plots.
Excavations have provided an idea of the housing development. The plots of the private houses were about 10m wide. The typical Vicus-building is the so-called Strip House with a gable that projected into the street. The houses stood close to one another and often used common partition walls. Protected from the weather by overhanging canopies travellers and citizens hurried along the shop fronts.
Many activities went on in the vicus. Farmers offered produce from the outlying regions and travelling salesmen sold the latest pottery. Local smiths repaired wagons and carriages and clad  wooden wheels with iron rims.
In the rear courtyards of shops and residential buildings the wells, cisterns and sewers show how thoroughly designed was the supply and disposal of water. Behind the houses there were gardens in which one could find imported apple, pear and cherry trees as well as local nut and plum trees. Pulses such as beans, peas and lentils were part of the staple diet. In the vegetable and herb gardens carrots, beets, cabbage and lettuce were planted while in between grew wild camomile, black cumin, clover and feverfew. Apart from the cultivation of fruit and vegetables there was no large-scale farming in the street settlements. 
Every day travellers, merchants and the inhabitants of the vicus Belginum frequented the temple districts situated in the east and in the west of the settlement in order to offer sacrifice and ask for the protection of the gods. Worship of the Romano-Celtic goddess Epona, sacred to carters, is already documented.
In the grave field situated to the east of the settlement the inhabitants buried their dead alongside the Roman street. Wealth and prosperity was expressed in stone funerary monuments standing close to, and visible from, the street. Family groups buried their deceased alongside each other within grave gardens.
The foundation of the street settlement in the early 1st century A.D. was probably connected to both the construction of the road and the Roman camp which was then developed in order to protect the traffic junction.
In the 2nd half of the 3rd century the boom years of the settlement were over, probably ended by the constant raids of the Germanic tribes.
According to coins found here the place existed in some smaller form up until the end of the 4th century when it was abandoned.
The Celtic graves of the necropolis situated to the north – east belong to a pre-Roman settlement, the exact location of which is still unknown. The ancestors of the later street settlement of Belginum lived in small settlements and in scattered granges.

[Martin Thoma]