Canabae of Bonna
About
Immediately outside the fortress walls, a civilian settlement grew up to house soldiers' families, veterans, traders, and craftsmen dependent on the garrison. Excavations across three campaigns recovered roughly 20,000 finds — coins, bronze jewelry, glassware, roof tiles, butchered animal bone — attesting to potters, innkeepers, and metalworkers living beside the fort. Occupation runs continuously from the second half of the 1st century through the end of the 3rd, so by 117 CE, under Legio I Minervia, the canabae would have been a dense, well-established quarter.
In ancient writing
- Tacitus, Histories 4.20
Names Bonna as the winter camp of the First legion, where Batavian rebels confronted the Roman garrison during the revolt of Civilis.
Sources
Nearby
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