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Original Article
Introduction
To date in the Netherlands, basalt stones of Roman derivation have only been reported from inside the limits of the Roman Empire, in particular from the boundary zone itself, which is commonly referred to as the Limes (Fig. 1). For a general and informal treatise on the Limes of Germania Inferior, the Roman province along the Lower Rhine, readers should refer to Lendering (2011). Scores of basalt stones have been found in revetments, bridges, roads etc., forming part of the infrastructure of the Limes in the western Netherlands, and also as cargo aboard Roman vessels (de Groot & Morel, 2007; Luksen-IJtsma, 2010; Langeveld et al., 2010; Dielemans & van der Kamp, 2012). Since basalt does not occur naturally in the bedrock or drift cover of the Netherlands, the Romans must have imported the stones from outside the region. Indeed, the discovery of dozens of basalt blocks aboard the Roman freight vessel De Meern 4 on the bank of a palaeochannel of the Old Rhine (de Groot & Morel, 2007) strongly suggests that the Romans imported these stones in bulk shipments via the Rhine from the Central European Volcanic Province (CEVP; Fig. 1). Petrographically, these stones found in the Limes can be classified as alkali olivine basalt and basanite (Linthout, 2007; Linthout et al., 2009), which are precisely the dominant rock types of the CEVP (Wedepohl et al., 1994).
Fig. 1.
The Limes (red line), marking the boundary of the Roman Empire, and volcanic fields of the Central European Volcanic Province, after Wedepohl et al. (1994). S, Siebengebirge; WE, HE, EE, West-, Hoch- and East Eifel; W, Westerwald; V, Vogelsberg. The Roman site of Kotterbos is set in the geographical outlines of about 100 AD (after Vos & de Vries, 2013). At that time, the Limes coincides with the Rhine from where the river enters the Siebengebirge volcanic field. Roman basalts from the Limes with established provenances are from Utrecht and Vleuten-De Meern (VM).
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On the basis of chemical analysis, 60 basalt stones from the Limes in Vleuten-De Meern and Utrecht have been divided into two clearly defined groups, for each of which a matching basalt source could be...