Daily life in Augusta Raurica during the 2nd century CE

A grounded look at a Roman town near the Rhine, where houses, workshops, baths, fountains, shops, roads, and surrounding farms shaped ordinary routines.

Augusta Raurica stood on the south bank of the Rhine, in the area of modern Augst and Kaiseraugst east of Basel. By the 2nd century CE, it was a Roman colony and regional center in Germania Superior, no longer on an active military frontier: the Upper German-Raetian frontier had moved well to the north and east, and the earlier auxiliary fort had given way to civilian development. The older Upper Town occupied the plateau around the forum and theater, while civilian housing and commerce spread through the Lower Town toward the Rhine from about 100 CE. Its streets, baths, sanctuaries, workshops, shops, and houses did not all belong to one fixed moment; excavation reveals repeated rebuilding and changes of use across the century.[1][2][8]

Housing and Living Spaces

Housing in 2nd-century Augusta Raurica ranged from small units combined with shops or workshops to substantial town houses with courtyards, painted walls, heated rooms, storage, and reception spaces. Most Upper Town blocks appear to have contained several separate residential or commercial units, commonly with street-facing work or sales rooms; upper storeys are often inferred but rarely survive. Timber and half-timbered buildings were increasingly replaced in stone from the later 1st century, although wood, plaster, roofing, furniture, textiles, baskets, and leather remained essential and are less visible archaeologically than masonry, pottery, or metal.[2]

Wealth shaped both space and access to services. In Insula 1, an affluent house of the late 1st and early 2nd centuries had an excavated kitchen, shop, and water-supplied private latrine; by the middle of the 2nd century a more villa-like residence with a garden replaced earlier street-side shops. This exceptional household should not be treated as the norm. The site's furnished Roman House is also a modern reconstruction modeled on an urban house at Pompeii, useful for explaining Roman building practices but not a preserved Augusta Raurica home. A contrasting 2nd-century complex at Kaiseraugst-Schmidmatt combined a courtyard, food storage and processing, probable lodging, heated living space, and a workshop interpreted cautiously as a fullery. These buildings show that household, service, production, and sales space could overlap, not that every shopkeeper or worker lived in the same arrangement.[2][3][4][5]

Daily comfort also depended on unequal access to water. A masonry conduit carried water about 6.5 km from the Ergolz near Liestal to a distribution point at the town; timber and some lead pipes then supplied public fountains, baths, toilets, and selected private buildings. Deep wells are known in the Lower Town. A private latrine or piped supply therefore marks privilege rather than a universal standard, and many households still had to carry water for drinking, washing, cooking, and craft work. The system itself required inspection and repair, while bath heating required large and continuing supplies of fuel.[2][6]

Food and Daily Meals

Meals in Augusta Raurica combined produce from farms in the surrounding region with goods carried by road and river. Cereals and pulses were dependable staples, supplemented according to season and means by fruit, vegetables, dairy products, eggs, and meat. Animal-bone assemblages confirm the importance of cattle, pigs, and sheep or goats, but their proportions vary by deposit and do not translate directly into portions eaten by every social group. Amphora studies document imported wine, olive oil, fish sauce, and preserved southern fruits; the containers demonstrate supply to the town more securely than the identity or wealth of each consumer.[7][9]

Food preparation was hard routine work. Grain had to be measured, cleaned, ground, mixed, baked, or boiled. Water had to be fetched, fuel purchased or gathered, hearths managed, vessels washed, and leftovers protected from pests. Kitchens used pottery cooking pots, bronze or iron utensils, knives, mortars, pestles, strainers, amphorae, storage jars, bowls, cups, baskets, and wooden implements. In a wealthy house, cooks and other household workers could organize several dishes for guests. In households with fewer resources, cooking could overlap with childcare, washing, spinning, shopkeeping, or market errands. The excavated food-service spaces at Schmidmatt indicate that prepared food and lodging were available to at least some residents and travelers.[5]

Meals also marked social difference, but the best evidence often comes from unusual contexts. At the affluent Insula 1 house, flotation and study of material around the kitchen hearth recovered relatively high proportions of chicken and hare as well as imported whole mackerel. Together with the architecture, this supports a high-status diet in that particular early-2nd-century household; it is not a menu for the town as a whole. At Schmidmatt, a larder, vessels, animal bones, and installations interpreted as meat processing connect food to roadside commerce. Such deposits reveal ingredients, but preservation, disposal, and excavation methods all filter what survives.[4][5]

Work and Labor

Work in Augusta Raurica drew together agriculture, trade, craft production, transport, service, and municipal administration. The town's position near the Rhine and on roads through the Upper Rhine region made it useful for moving goods, animals, people, and information. Farms and estates in the surrounding region supplied grain, animals, timber, wool, hides, and fuel, while carts, pack animals, river routes, and porters connected producers with urban consumers. The precise balance of tenant, hired, household, and enslaved agricultural labor is not recoverable from the town's material remains.[2][9]

Inside the town, work filled houses, shops, public buildings, and roadside commercial spaces. Excavated installations and waste identify pottery and tile production, metalworking, meat processing, and textile finishing more securely than the many occupations that must otherwise be inferred from a Roman town's needs. Shops and workshops commonly faced porticoes or streets, where daylight, access to customers, carts, and water mattered. Space-hungry, smoky, or fire-prone pottery production lay mainly towards the urban edge. At Schmidmatt, the interpretation of an inn or tavern and a fullery rests on the arrangement of rooms, storage, a stone basin, heating or drying facilities, and food remains; even here, the excavators retain some uncertainty about precise functions.[2][5]

Public life created its own labor needs. The forum served political, economic, administrative, legal, and religious functions; its porticoes included small rooms interpreted as offices, shops, or storerooms. Bathhouses needed water, fuel, furnace tending, cleaning, and repairs to drains and hypocausts. Streets, roofs, sewers, and fountains also required maintenance. Labor conditions varied widely: households and enterprises could combine the work of owners, relatives, tenants, hired workers, dependents, freedpeople, and enslaved people. Archaeology usually identifies an activity or workspace more readily than the legal status, gender, or name of the person who worked there.[10]

Social Structure

Augusta Raurica's society was layered by citizenship, legal status, wealth, office, gender, age, origin, and patronage. Civic elites held local office, funded public benefactions, and displayed status through inscriptions, houses, dining, dress, and burial monuments. Town councilors, priests of the imperial cult, officials, merchants, and wealthy families formed the most visible public world. Their names and honors were more likely to be carved in stone, but that visibility should not be mistaken for numerical dominance.[8][10]

Free householders of more modest means, traders, artisans, laborers, dependents, freedpeople, and enslaved people are harder to distinguish in excavated rooms and objects. Freedpeople were legally free but could remain tied to former owners through patronage and obligation. Enslaved people were property under Roman law and could be compelled to work in households, businesses, workshops, or agriculture, including at skilled tasks. The local evidence confirms their presence but rarely permits a particular workshop or domestic chore to be assigned securely to free, freed, or enslaved labor.[8]

Names scratched on pottery and written on stone complicate any picture of a culturally uniform population. People bearing indigenous Celtic names remained visible at Augusta Raurica alongside people with Latin names, while most surviving texts use Latin script and language. Pottery graffiti, styli, inkpots, and wall inscriptions occur not only in monumental or elite settings but also in mixed residential, workshop, and commercial areas; some named writers or owners were women. This evidence suggests practical forms of literacy among a socially mixed population, not universal reading and writing. It also has strong biases: wood writing tablets scarcely survive in the local soil, monumental inscriptions favor those who could afford them, and a Latin name or text does not by itself reveal a person's spoken language, ancestry, or legal status.[8]

Tools and Technology

Tools in Augusta Raurica ranged from ordinary hand objects to large urban systems. Finds include lamps, keys, locks, knives, needles, spindle whorls, pottery vessels, mortars, querns, metalworking tools and waste, scales, weights, coins, seals, and writing equipment. They illuminate cooking, fastening, textile work, repair, manufacture, exchange, and record-keeping, but survival is uneven: iron corrodes, and wood, leather, cloth, basketry, and writing tablets usually disappear. The concentration of styli and pottery graffiti in busy mixed-use blocks shows that writing served trade and workshop life as well as civic administration, without establishing how many residents were literate.[8]

The town's infrastructure was just as important. A masonry water conduit brought fresh water over several kilometers, then wooden pipes and public fittings distributed it to fountains, baths, toilets, and wealthy homes. Hypocaust heating warmed selected rooms and bath spaces through furnaces, flues, floors, and wall channels, but it required fuel, tending, and repair. Stone paving, drains, sewers, porticoes, wells, workshops, temples, theaters, roads, and public buildings turned engineering into daily habit. Technology did not remove labor. It organized labor around water carrying, fire tending, drain clearing, pipe repair, tool sharpening, roof maintenance, and the movement of goods through streets and roads.

Clothing and Materials

Clothing in 2nd-century Augusta Raurica followed Roman provincial habits while responding to climate, occupation, and status. Tunics were common daily garments, worn belted and adapted by length, weave, color, and quality. Wool was important for warmth in the Upper Rhine region, while linen served lighter garments and underclothing. Cloaks, hoods, caps, veils, belts, brooches, pins, leather shoes, sandals, boots, and jewelry helped mark gender, age, work, wealth, and public occasion. Formal civic dress signaled rank, but most people dressed for walking, carrying, cooking, farming, shop work, service, and seasonal weather.

The local evidence is stronger for manufacture than for complete wardrobes. Spinning, weaving, and sewing tools show that textiles were worked in the settlement, while brooches, pins, beads, and belt fittings survive more readily than cloth. At Schmidmatt, a masonry basin and a heatable drying room are among the reasons part of the complex is interpreted as a possible fullery for finishing cloth, but the identification is not certain. Wool and linen, leather shoes and straps, and repeated mending are reasonable features of provincial life; Augusta Raurica's finds rarely reveal a garment's full cut, colour, owner, or sequence of reuse. Dress fittings likewise cannot automatically be assigned to a gender or social rank.[5]

Daily life in Augusta Raurica during the 2nd century CE was neither a simple copy of Rome nor an isolated local village routine. It was a Roman provincial town made practical by water systems, road traffic, farms, workshops, household labor, legal hierarchies, and neighborhood relationships. Its monuments show public ambition, but its ordinary history lies in the repeated work of cooking, carrying, repairing, buying, selling, worshipping, bathing, and maintaining a home near the Rhine.

Sources and Further Reading

Augusta Raurica. Metropolis on the River Rhine. Site history.
Schmidts, Thomas. Colonia Augusta Raurica–Augst. Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie, Transformation project. Site synthesis and bibliography.
Augusta Raurica. Living in style at the Roman house. Museum description of the Pompeii-based reconstruction.
Hoffmann, Birgitta. Review of Hans Sütterlin and Marianne Petrucci-Bavaud, Kastelen 2: Die älteren Steinbauten in den Insulae 1 und 2 von Augusta Raurica, Forschungen in Augst 22 (Römermuseum Augst, 1999). Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.02.01. Review and bibliographic record.
Wyss, Stephan, and Annina Wyss Schildknecht. Der römische Gebäudekomplex von Kaiseraugst-Schmidmatt: Handel und Gewerbe an der Fernstrasse in der Unterstadt von Augusta Raurica. Forschungen in Augst 56. Schwabe Verlag, 2022. Publisher's record.
Augusta Raurica. The water conduit – fresh water for the town. Monument description.
Martin-Kilcher, Stefanie. Die römischen Amphoren aus Augst und Kaiseraugst, Band 1: Die südspanischen Ölamphoren (Gruppe 1). Forschungen in Augst 7/1, 1987; and Band 2: Die Amphoren für Wein, Fischsauce, Südfrüchte (Gruppen 2–24) und Gesamtauswertung. Forschungen in Augst 7/2, 1994. Römermuseum Augst. Official publication catalogue and downloads.
Willi, Anna. “Writing Latin in Germania Superior.” In Alex Mullen and Anna Willi, eds., Latinization, Local Languages, and Literacies in the Roman West, 273–320. Oxford University Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191994760.003.0008
Grau-Sologestoa, Idoia, Sabine Deschler-Erb, and Claudia Gerling. “Livestock management during times of transition: Exploring the relationship between animal size and diet from Roman to early medieval Augusta Raurica (Switzerland).” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 16, 77 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-024-01973-y
Augusta Raurica. The forum – the centre of the town. Monument description.