Greece & Rome · Early Roman Empire (Augustus to 1st century AD) · Windisch (Vindonissa), Aargau, Switzerland
Probable Roman bread and earliest army camp found at Vindonissa, Switzerland
A rescue excavation in Windisch, Aargau, has traced the timber-and-earth wall of Vindonissa's first military camp and found what may be Switzerland's first known Roman bread.
Official announcement
Windisch (Vindonissa), Switzerland Archaeologists in Windisch, in the Swiss canton of Aargau, have found the defences of the earliest Roman military camp at Vindonissa, along with a charred round object that specialists provisionally identify as a Roman bread. If the identification is confirmed, it would be the first Roman bread documented in Switzerland. The newly found fortification is older than the defences of the 1st-century AD legionary fortress that later stood on the site.
The finds come from a rescue excavation by the Aargau Cantonal Archaeology service, which has been working since mid-August 2025 on an area of about 4,000 square metres between Zürcherstrasse and Scheuergasse. A large residential development is planned there. The plot lies directly in front of the southwestern side of the legionary camp, and the work is meant to record the remains before construction begins.
Walls of the first camp
At two points in the southern and western parts of the site, the team found traces of a fortification earlier than the legionary camp's defensive system, which has been studied extensively. Two parallel ditches, with marks left by posts set at regular intervals, show that a wall of timber and earth stood here. Immediately south of it, the excavators recorded the start of a V-shaped ditch.
A ditch with very similar features was found more than ninety years ago by the first researchers at Vindonissa, in Königsfelden park further north. With the new section on Zürcherstrasse, the archaeologists can for the first time estimate the size of the earliest camp. On current data it stretched almost 400 metres from north to south.
That matters for a long-running debate about when the temporary military post became a permanent legionary camp: still under the emperor Augustus, or only after his death in AD 14, under his successor Tiberius. The cantonal archaeologists expect the remaining excavation to help settle the question.
Inside the oldest camp, a building survived well because a later Roman road was laid over it. It has two groups of rooms with an identical layout: two small spaces beside a larger room with a hearth. Elsewhere on the site, deposits from the later legionary camp produced many metal tools, forge slag, spearheads and projectiles. A large, carefully built clay oven sits just inside the wall of the earliest camp, which the team takes as evidence that the strip behind the defences was already used for production in Vindonissa's first phase.
A small flatbread
The bread first appeared as a round, completely charred black object that caught the excavators' attention while they were cleaning the site. It was lifted in a block of surrounding soil and taken to the cantonal archaeology restoration laboratory, where it was excavated under controlled conditions. An archaeobotanist from the Department of Integrative Prehistoric Archaeology and Natural Sciences at the University of Basel examined it and concluded, from a preliminary visual inspection, that it is very probably a charred Roman loaf. The published reports do not say which phase of the site it came from.
The object is about 10 centimetres across and roughly 3 centimetres thick, resembling a small flatbread or unleavened bread. Roman breads are extremely rare finds, because organic food normally rots away. It survives only when it has been charred, a process called carbonisation in which the material is turned largely to carbon and no longer decays. Examples include the loaves found in a bakery oven at Pompeii, the city buried by Vesuvius in AD 79.
The project leaders plan more detailed scientific analysis at a specialised laboratory in Vienna, which is expected to establish what the bread was made of.
The site will hold an open day on Saturday 9 May 2026, from 10am to 4pm, with free guided tours every hour and no registration required. Information stations will explain each stage of the excavation and show a selection of the finds. Excavation on Zürcherstrasse is scheduled to continue until the end of July 2026.
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