FLORENVILLE-CHAMELEUX
Belgium.
An
important station on the Rheims-Trier road. The site
was excavated in 1954-56, and in 1966 the remains of
the buildings were made into an archaeological zone.
Digging made it possible both to see how Roman roads
were built in N Gallia and to study an official statio of
the cursus publicus. The road from Rheims to Trier
was built under Claudius, as is shown by a milestone
(found at Buzenol, not far from the Chameleux station) which probably originated in the vicus of Etalle,
from which remains were carried to Buzenol as building
material. When the road was built, the site was first
cleared down to virgin soil and a ditch dug to mark the
axis of the road. Next, two more ditches, one at each
side, were hollowed out and the earth shifted to the
middle so as to fill the middle ditch and make the first
layer of the road surface. This latter was made of stone,
carefully placed edgewise to a thickness of 25 cm. On
top of this a layer of gravel was placed, 10-20 cm thick,
as surface. The Roman roads of northern Gallia do not
seem to have been paved with stone. The width of the
surface was 5.8 m (20 Roman feet); counting the side
ditches the total width of the road came to 14 m. The
road was restored and strengthened at different times
with the addition of fresh layers of gravel, so that
in places the gravel was ultimately more than 2.5 m
thick.
The statio proper existed from the middle of the 1st
c. A.D. to the beginning of the 5th. It consisted of a
number of buildings arranged on either side of the highway. These structures were rebuilt several times, as traces
of fire and floods at several levels reveal; however, it
seems likely that the damaged buildings were, for the
most part, rebuilt on the same locations and according to
the same plans. The earliest buildings were of wood;
later ones had masonry walls of fairly irregular blocks
bonded with strong mortar. Most of the structures were
built on oblong plans, a narrow side (8-10 m wide)
fronting the street, along which extended a wooden
colonnade. There were no party walls, the houses being
separated by roofless passageways to lessen the danger
from fire. The hearth was sometimes in the middle of
the main room, sometimes backed up against a wall.
Most of the buildings had a small cellar reached by a
wooden staircase; often there are traces of half-buried
amphorae on the floor. The largest building (24 x 10 m)
had a wide entrance leading to a central courtyard on
either side of which were sheds for vehicles; at the back
of the courtyard was the main part of the building:
this was most likely the mutatio where the vehicles of
the cursus publicus changed horses.
After the invasions of the second half of the 3d c.
the principal vici of the Rheims-Trier road, such as
Carignan and Arlon, were fortified. It was then that a
rectangular fort was built on the hills overlooking the
statio of Chameleux (the Williers hills, on the other
side of the present Franco-Belgian frontier); the ruins
of the wall surrounding it can still be seen. The fort
may have been occupied by a detachment of Germanic
Laeti; in fact the
Notitia Dignitatum (
occ. 42.38) mentions some Laeti being at Epoisso (Carignan), only a
few km from Chameleux.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
J. Mertens, “Quelques aspects de la
Romanisation dans l'Ouest du Pays Gaumais,”
Helinium
3 (1963) 205-24; id., “La Luxembourg méridional au
Bas-Empire,”
Mémorial A. Bertrang (1964) 191-202;
id.,
Le relais romain de Chameleux (1968) 36 pp.
MPI.
S. J. DE LAET
