Germany’s Rome resistance revealed

David Crossland, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: December 22. 2008 8:30AM UAE / December 22. 2008 4:30AM GMT

Prospect technician Harald Nagel searches in an archaeological excavation area in Kalefeld, Germany. Joerg Sarbach / AP

BERLIN // The battle raged in a dense pine forest on a hill in northern Germany 1,800 years ago, and there is little doubt that the disciplined, well-equipped Romans routed the Germanic warriors who ambushed them.

The site of the carnage, discovered by chance by an amateur treasure hunter, is so well preserved that archaeologists have been able to piece together the action, and they have likened it to the opening scene of the Ridley Scott movie Gladiator.

Archaeologists are hailing their discovery of the battlefield near the town of Kalefeld south of Hanover as a sensation because it may force a reassessment of Roman history in northern Europe. It shows the Romans were still sending armies deep into hostile Germania in the third century, far later than most historians had believed.

The discovery of wagon parts and of a wide variety of weapons, including arrows of the type used by Syrian or Persian archers who served in Roman armies, suggest the Roman force may have numbered up to 20,000, one historian with knowledge of the dig said. More conservative estimates put the force at 1,000 at least.

The Romans, heading from north to south across a ridge called Harzhorn Hill, unleashed a torrent of heavy iron bolts from catapult machines before mounting an infantry attack in tight formations that smashed through the line of what the Romans called “barbarians”.

“We found 300 catapult bolts buried in the ground in clusters, and most of them were facing in the same direction,” said Hans-Wilhelm Heine, the archaeologist at the Lower Saxony Conservation Department, which is in charge of the dig.
“That showed us the positions of the Germanic warriors and of the Romans. The projectiles were of the type fired by so-called ‘Scorpio’ torsion weapons that could be fired at a rate of four to six per minute,” Mr Heine said.

“They were accurate and had a high velocity, which meant they could penetrate several millimetres of metal. The psychological impact of such projectiles being fired so powerfully at a phalanx of shields must have been enormous when someone was wounded and started screaming.”

Once the rain of bolts and arrows had wreaked their havoc, the Romans mounted an infantry attack.

“On the path below the ridge, nails from Roman sandals were found lying in certain sections of the ground so that you can say that’s where large numbers of Roman foot soldiers must have been massed,” said Gunther Moosbauer, an archaeologist at the University of Osnabrück who is involved in the project.
“That’s why one assumes there was an infantry attack that ended the fight.”

The victorious Romans then headed south, back towards the safety of the Empire, which lay behind a fortified line known as the Limes that stretched across modern-day southern Germany from the Rhine to the Danube river.

Archaeologists have been scouring the 1.5 kilometre-wide area of towering pines with metal detectors since late August after a local man handed in lance tips, iron projectiles and an iron hipposandal – a form of horseshoe used by the Romans – he had found on the hill.

“No other ancient battlefield discovered by archaeologists to date has delivered such impressive, undisturbed traces of bitter fighting,” the Lower Saxony conservation department said in a statement.

It is the most important Roman-era battlefield to be found in Germany since the discovery farther west of the possible location of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, where Arminius, or “Herman the German”, wiped out three Roman legions, a force of 20,000 men, in 9AD.

That battle, which some historians describe as the birth of the German nation, marked the start of a seven-year war that halted Rome’s northern expansion and drove the Empire back down to the Rhine.

Historians believe the battle on Harzhorn Hill took place about 200 years later because they found a well-worn coin from the time of Emperor Commodus – the villain in Gladiator – who ruled from 180 to 192. They also found a knife scabbard that could not have been made before the end of the second century.

“For the second and third centuries we had no evidence of Roman military presence in Germania,” Mr Moosbauer said. “There are some historical sources that referred to military campaigns but they weren’t taken very seriously.”
The Roman historian Herodian described how Emperor Maximinus Thrax fought a battle in Germania and won a big victory in a punitive campaign following raids by Germanic tribes into Roman territory in 233-234.

The same battle was described in the Augustan History, a late Roman collection of biographies of the emperors, but historians did not believe its claim that the battle took place 500 to 650 kilometres inside hostile Germania. They thought it was more likely to be 50 to 65 kilometres.

“We will now have to re-evaluate Herodian and the Augustan History and take a completely new look at Roman policy in Germania in the second and third centuries. That’s the sensational thing about the battlefield,” Mr Moosbauer said.

Among the 600 objects retrieved so far are wagon parts, a Roman engineer’s axe and a multitude of sandal nails. Wheel hubs, the remains of horse harnesses and tent pegs testify to the size of the Roman force.

Fragments of slave shackles were also found, along with three-winged arrow heads of the sort used by archers from Syria and Persia, and one spear tip found was attached to the remnants of a wooden shaft that initial tests suggest could be North African.

Archaeologists will start digging deeper next year to find out more about the battlefield, for example if there were any constructed fortifications.
“It’s unusual to find a battlefield containing so many weapons because they’re usually gathered up afterwards,” said Marcus Trier, vice director of the Roman-Germanic Museum in Cologne. “It was all valuable raw material.”

The plethora of weapons is one of the big mysteries of the Kalefeld site.
“Battlefields sometimes become sacrosanct because many people died there and it is declared out of bounds,” Mr Moosbauer said. “Alternatively, the arrows may have landed in thorn bushes and were never retrieved. We just don’t know the answer.”

There is virtually no doubt that the Romans won the fight because no breastplates or other personal equipment were found. The presence of such remnants on a field of battle usually betrays a defeated army.

No trace of the Germanic warriors has been found yet, but that may be because they fought with Roman weapons and their remains may have been removed after the fight.

Germany will be focusing on its Roman history next year when the country will mark the 2,000th anniversary of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, described as the “Big Bang of German History”, with an array of exhibitions, theatre performances and costumed re-enactments.

But Herman the German’s victory is not universally hailed in Germany because it deprived much of the country of Roman culture and comforts such as lavatories, steam baths and haute cuisine. Germania, said the archaeologist Dirk Husemann, was the “Eastern bloc of ancient times”.

dcrossland@thenational.ae