Listed 3 sub titles with search on: Information about the place for wider area of: "GHENT Town BELGIUM" .
Ganda (Ghent) Belgium.
A Gallo-Roman vicus of the city of the Menapii, at the confluence of the Lys and
the Escaut. Nothing was known of it until excavations were started in 1960. The
name, appearing only in mediaeval sources, is pre-Roman and means "meeting
of rivers". On the site of the vicus a settlement with necropolis was found,
dating from the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age (from the end of Ha A to the end
of Ha D), but so far no remains have been discovered of an Iron Age settlement
that would have preceded the Gallo-Roman vicus. The beginnings of the vicus go
back to the mid 1st c. A.D. The settlement spread out for 2 km on a narrow strip
of land surrounded by marshes on the left bank of the Escaut: to the W, from the
point where the two rivers meet; to the E, up to the modern village of Destelbergen.
At the W end of the vicus, in the ruins of the mediaeval abbey of St. Bavon, great
quantities of Roman pottery were found ca. 1930, but thorough excavations have
taken place only at the E end of the settlement. Isolated finds were made in between
these two spots. The excavations, which were carried out at the edge of present-day
Ghent, revealed that the part of the vicus studied was half rural in character
(with orchards, meadows, and paddocks for cattle, but no fields) and half industrial
(with significant traces of iron-smelting works, limonite from nearby boglands
being used for ore). No fewer than ten wells, with wooden linings, were found;
most probably they were related to the iron-smelting operation. To the SE of the
vicus a large necropolis was found with from 1000 to 2000 tombs, most of them
from the 3d c. Among these tombs, which are of the incineration-pit type, is one
that is unique in the archaeology of the NW provinces of the Roman Empire. This
is a collective tomb (13.3 x 1.4 m) in which were found the charred bones of about
twenty deceased--men, women, and children. The rich grave gifts, placed on the
pyre along with the bodies, had been severely damaged. Among the objects were
sherds of 700 to 800 pottery vases, 25 coins, about 50 fibulas (some 20 of them
enameled), a perfume flask of bronze, rings, hairpins, glass and bone articles.
The tomb is generally taken as evidence that an epidemic raged through the vicus,
in the course of which a large number of its inhabitants perished.
Ganda was linked to Bavai by a road that passed through the vici of
Velzeke and Blicquy. Other roads probably connected it to the settlements of Aardenburg
to the XV and Hofstade and Asse to the E. The vicus was certainly still inhabited
in the 4th c. There is some evidence, from topography and the study of local place
names, that there was a castellum at Ganda in the 4th c.; its site has not yet
been definitely located.
In the 7th c. a Merovingian settlement took the place of the Gallo-Roman
vicus; its inhabitants were evangelized by St. Amand, who built an abbey there
(later dedicated to St. Bavon). By the 8th and 9th c. the town had become a port
of some economic importance, but was completely destroyed at the time of the Viking
invasions in the 9th c. When the Vikings left, another port which developed farther
W, between the Lys and the Escaut, kept the name of the old vicus. Ghent (Fr.
Gand) became one of the leading cities of the Middle Ages, although the site of
the original vicus had become by then completely rural.
S.J. De Laet, ed.
This text is from: The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites,
Princeton University Press 1976. Cited Feb 2006 from
Perseus Project URL below, which contains bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.
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