Roman Museum

We drove by a big building claiming to be a Roman Museum every time we took the direct route to "Stammtisch" but it wasn't till near the end of our time in Ingolstadt that we actually visited.  It's too bad really because I would have been more likely to write about it right away instead of letting more than half a year slip by erasing too much info from my memory.

I have no idea any more why I took these two pictures, but I'm including them for any German speakers with a flare for Roman history who wants to figure it out.

We all had audio guides as we walked along.  I somehow don't have any pictures from the beginning.  One of the best parts was a full scale reconstruction of half of a Roman house including a hung door with a lock and key that you could try locking and unlocking.  The big key could double as a weapon if you got into a scuffle on the street, but it really worked.   

There were bones showing evidences of operations and battle.  There was jewelry.  There were coins, tools, weapons, pottery.  All of the artifacts were found in the nearby countryside.  Remember the oldest running festival at the tiny town that gets hundreds of thousands of visitors that we went to?  That festival has ties back to a Roman horse market, probably the same Romans that left some of their stuff for the museum 2000 years later.  

Another fascinating and mind-blowingly impressive thing was the model showing how they built a massive bridge to span the Danube (Donau auf Deutcsh).  They had to block the water in order to dig down and anchor it, and that was just the easy beginning.  It seems like SO much planning and work, but transportation was key to their empire building and maintaining.  Um, I don't have a picture of that.

I do have pictures of the boat found semi-preserved in the mud. Isaac and Makenna are sitting in the reconstructed part.  The bottom picture shows the actual remains.  It's not too wide, but very long. 

The only other pictures I have are of what they thought the Roman garrison looked like.  The detail was impressive.  You can picture the little soldiers getting up to mischief like in Night at the Museum.