The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence of great many archaeological societies all over Europe. Shortly after Belgium’s independence, quite a few of these societies came into being in our area, societies that were dedicated to highlighting and preserving our common heritage. Numerous excavation campaigns were undertaken throughout the country.<\/p>\n
These were the historical circumstances circa 1890, when the Archaeological Society of Namur uncovered an imposing main building and four outbuildings, on the site known as Neufch\u00e2teau (that lies between Jemelle and Rochefort).<\/p>\n
This provided us with a rare occurrence of a nearly complete ground plan of a working Gallo-Roman villa, a villa that was most certainly inhabited and active during the first four centuries of our era. At the time, the researchers\u2019 main objective was to piece together the pieces of the puzzle and form a general idea of their lifestyle.\u00a0 They managed this by interpreting the different archaeological artefacts that were dug up.<\/p>\n
A century later, between 1992 and 1997, a new excavation campaign was carried out by the archaeologists of the Walloon Region.\u00a0 The digs provided us with interesting new data which supplemented the previous discoveries (additional outbuilding, glass-blower\u2019s oven, forge, etc.) and supplied us with a more precise chronology as well as additional information about the buildings\u2019 purposes.\u00a0 It also gave us a more precise picture of the site\u2019s natural environment. The existence of a pond dating from the Antiquity was established, and thanks to pollen analysis a number of vegetal species were identified. Thanks to this research, we now have an overall view of the antique farm of Malagne ; it was an agricultural domain that was divided into two separate parts : the pars urbana\u00a0 or main living area, with the thermae and latrines and the pars rustica which included the 5 outbuildings which served\u00a0 an agricultural purpose, the pond and the surrounding land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence of great many archaeological societies all over Europe. Shortly after…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5707,"parent":1020,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-1025","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n