---
title: "Under a car park at Augusta Raurica, a Roman window grille with two of its nails"
description: "The iron grille lay 1.7 metres down at the Swiss site. Ironwork this complete rarely survives, and the site’s own depot holds few like it"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-13T21:12:13Z
modified: 2026-10-14T05:06:32Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/under-a-car-park-at-augusta-raurica-a-roman-window-grille-wi-7248c1
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "rome", "switzerland", "history", "architecture", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Under a car park at Augusta Raurica, a Roman window grille with two of its nails

*The iron grille lay 1.7 metres down at the Swiss site. Ironwork this complete rarely survives, and the site’s own depot holds few like it*

By Nate Ledger · October 13, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/under-a-car-park-at-augusta-raurica-a-roman-window-grille-wi-7248c1

## In brief

- Archaeologists at Augusta Raurica near Basel found a nearly intact Roman iron window grille about 1.7 metres underground
- The grille has five iron bars, two flat strips and edge eyelets for a wooden frame; two original nails are still in it
- Augusta Raurica said on October 8, 2026 that its collection holds only a few comparable objects
- Researchers are considering whether fire or another structural failure brought down the wall that held the window
- The grille is now in the site’s collection depot for study and conservation, which may help date the building

Archaeologists at Augusta Raurica, the Roman town near Basel, have dug up an iron window grille that is almost entirely intact. Two of the nails that once held it in place are still in it. It lay about 1.7 metres below the surface, in the first weeks of an excavation around the site’s rebuilt Roman house, among the remains of a masonry building that the team is still trying to understand. The find was [reported by Arkeonews](https://arkeonews.net/rare-roman-window-grille-unearthed-in-switzerland-with-ancient-nails-still-in-place/), drawing on an announcement Augusta Raurica made on October 8, 2026.

The object is simple. Five iron bars run through it and are held together by two flat iron strips. Along the edges are eyelets, which show where it was fixed to a wooden window frame. [Archaeology Magazine](https://archaeology.org/news/2026/10/13/roman-window-grille-uncovered-in-switzerland/) calls those fittings rings and the strips crosspieces. Either way it is a grid of bars, and the Romans who built it fastened it into a frame so nobody could easily take it out.

The interesting part is how rarely things like this survive. According to the site’s announcement, its archaeological collection holds only a few comparable pieces. Roman towns leave plenty of pottery and coins, because people dropped, broke and lost those all the time. Complete architectural ironwork is much scarcer. [La Brújula Verde](https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2026/10/archaeologists-unearth-a-complete-roman-window-grille-nails-and-all-at-augusta-raurica-the-oldest-colony-on-the-rhine/) explains why: the wooden frame rots, any glass breaks, and the iron rusts away. A window is several materials attached to each other, and they decay at different rates. To find one with the frame gone but the bars and nails still where they were is to find the part that was built to last and outlasted the rest.

![Rusted iron bars remain attached to a broken wooden frame, with splintered wood and glass shards scattered below on a parchment-colored background.](https://rews.cc/img/eec90b9bab1b4d9bcb2fc9a90bd234dc01feb93f.webp)

Which is roughly what a window grille is for.

Roman builders had to make the same trade-off anyone with a window still makes. You want light and air, and you don’t want strangers coming in. Wooden shutters were common and do the job until you open them. An iron grille keeps people out without blocking daylight or ventilation. Imagine, purely as a hypothetical, that you are a Roman householder on the Rhine with a ground-floor room and some things you would prefer to keep. Paying for five iron bars and a smith to fit them is the ancient version of buying a better lock. Whoever owned this building decided a window needed that, and their decision is now the most complete thing left of them.

What filled the window behind the bars is a different question, and the grille can’t answer it. The Romans did have window glass, especially in the imperial period. It was generally thicker and less clear than modern glass, often tinted green or blue, and it was used most in bathhouses, where panes let light in and kept heat from escaping, though some private houses had glazed windows too. The British Museum has a pane from the Herculaneum area dated to about AD 1–70 that measures roughly 54 by 31 centimetres. That is around 1,670 square centimetres, a bit bigger than a sheet of A3 paper, and it shows that first-century glassmakers could produce sizeable panels. At Augusta Raurica, though, nothing settles whether the opening held glass, sheets of mineral, or just wooden shutters. What survives is the security, without whatever it was protecting.

![Sunlight streams through a barred window into a dark stone room, casting long striped shadows across the cracked floor in a sepia-toned illustration.](https://rews.cc/img/f38a7474b66d16f2dedb84f03ac006a24b021824.webp)

## Twice dug, once missed

How the window ended up 1.7 metres down is still open. The archaeologists are considering whether a fire weakened the building until part of a wall fell, or whether some other structural failure brought the window down with it. Archaeology Magazine reports that the grille had been set in a wall of stone and mortar that later collapsed, and that the building has not been dated yet.

There is also a mild institutional irony here. The area, now a car park, was excavated twice in the 1990s. The new work is turning up architectural remains those earlier digs did not fully record, including part of an east–west wall, which is where the grille was found. Archaeology is mostly the practice of going back to look harder, and in this case looking harder found a window.

The grille has gone to Augusta Raurica’s archaeological collection depot. There, specialists will study how it was made, record its condition and conserve it. The hope is that this helps date the building and explain how it came down, which would tell the excavators something about the larger structure the window belonged to, the same way a gate or a temple can date a site (as at [Apulum](https://rews.cc/a/at-apulum-the-gate-of-legio-xiii-gemina-lay-four-metres-unde-290ad1) and [Kapersburg](https://rews.cc/a/german-archaeologists-find-roman-temple-to-mars-at-kapersbur-9d533e) this autumn).

![Gloved hands brush rust from an old iron grille on a workbench surrounded by tools, cloths, and trays of stone fragments.](https://rews.cc/img/d017ebe031d8bd0672ef89cd24810f2601d39b83.webp)

## A colony on the Rhine

The site itself is one of Switzerland’s most important Roman settlements. The colony dates to the late first century BC, when Roman expansion took over land inhabited by the Celtic Rauraci, and it grew up beside the Rhine, a major route linking the Alpine region with Rome’s northern provinces. From around AD 50, stone buildings gradually replaced earlier ones. As the frontier moved further north, the town found itself in a safer spot inside the empire, and its houses, workshops and public buildings spread. By the second and early third centuries it had a theatre, temples, public baths, a forum and an amphitheatre, along with merchants, artisans and residents of every class.

In the third century, political instability and military threats unsettled the Rhine frontier, and the town changed a great deal, though Romans kept living in the area, including at the fortified settlement of Castrum Rauracense. Today the archaeological park preserves much of that history, including the reconstructed Roman house the new dig surrounds.

So the reconstructed house got an authentic neighbour: a set of burglar bars that held up through two millennia of burial and two excavations of the car park above it.