Daily Life HistoryA library of ordinary lives

Daily life in Augusta Vindelicum during the 2nd century CE

In present-day Augsburg, archaeology offers glimpses of everyday life, but cannot reconstruct a complete day for an ordinary household.

A provincial capital

Augusta Vindelicum was Raetia’s provincial capital. Lothar Bakker places its municipal charter under Hadrian, probably around 121 CE. Administration employed soldiers, freedpeople and enslaved people; urban work extended beyond shops and workshops. Bakker’s archaeological account.

Supplying and working in the city

Surrounding farms supplied staple foods, while trade brought wine, oil and fish sauce. Bakker describes pottery production, metalworking and textile commerce across the city’s Roman history. These establish an economic setting, not an exact second-century household menu. The market building excavated at Stephansgasse is dated broadly to the second and third centuries.

The agricultural hinterland included farms around Göggingen, Inningen and Haunstetten. Fields occupied the loess soils, while river meadows supported livestock. Food supply therefore connected the urban population with work beyond the city itself. Imported provisions arrived from Italy, southern Spain and southern France in transport containers including amphorae and barrels.

Evidence for selling and handling goods also survives in funerary reliefs. Bakker describes workers tying a textile bale under supervision, as well as scenes of wine selling and payment on a monument to two wine merchants. These examples belong to his broader account of Roman Augsburg; they should not all be assigned a precise second-century date. They suggest questions about transport, storage and labour, without revealing an ordinary worker’s earnings or a household’s purchasing power. Local evidence for production and exchange.

Homes and comfort

Stone construction expanded in the early second century. Yet few private houses have been extensively excavated. A courtyard house south of the cathedral demonstrates one residential form; it cannot establish typical living conditions. Heated monumental buildings likewise do not prove universal domestic comfort. Evidence for buildings.

How much can we know?

The University of Augsburg describes a changing archaeological picture: discoveries have revised understandings of settlement, trade and chronology. Continuous occupation has also left Roman Augsburg without standing monuments or large accessible excavation areas. Its research programme brings together excavation publications and inscriptions.

The university’s overview describes a synthesis drawing on four decades of published finds, excavation reports and preliminary studies. Alongside this work, its digital resources include a scholarly bibliography and a collection of inscriptions with translations and brief commentaries. These offer complementary routes into the evidence: excavation publications provide material contexts, while inscriptions preserve particular written statements. University of Augsburg research overview.

The interpretive consequence is caution: a building, traded object or inscription can establish a particular activity without revealing how frequently every resident experienced it. This account therefore does not assign exact meals, wages, family routines or bath visits to an imagined inhabitant. Evidence spanning several centuries is identified as background rather than treated as a precisely dated snapshot.

For this second-century account, three questions guide interpretation: where was something found, how closely can it be dated, and what does it actually demonstrate? A market building can inform discussion of exchange without identifying every commodity sold there. Likewise, evidence that a product reached Augsburg does not establish that all households could afford it. These distinctions keep the account grounded in identifiable evidence while leaving gaps explicit.

Explore other places in the Classical daily life collection.

Sources and further reading