Roman smelting furnaces were discovered here and are visible.
During excavations in 1895 and 2008, two melting furnaces and a two-storey, burnt-down stone building from the 1st century AD were discovered in an earth fortification. Tacitus wrote that in 47 AD the Romans were mining for silver in the Mattiacan area, i.e. also on the Lower Lahn. The site is situated in the middle of medieval and modern traces of ore mining; the Pingen (open-cast mines) are conspicuous.