Eighteen hundred years ago, a small Roman army assaulted a hilltop in south cental Germany. After pounding the position with arrows, javelins and ballista bolts, the attackers swept up the north slope and overran the ridge line.
Who the defenders were and why the battle took place, we are never likely to know. The fighting itself, however, has left an after-image behind, now in the process of reconstruction by archeologists. Spiegel Online reports:
The site first came to light in the summer of 2000, when local metal detector hobbyists found some pieces of metal while looking for a medieval fort. The fragments languished for years, until the men finally decided to turn them in to Petra Loenne, the Northeim areaarchaeologist. . . .
Loenne quickly assembled a team of archaeologists and historians – and local metal detector hobbyists with good connections to the archaeological authorities. Her priority was to locate any more artifacts close to the surface as quickly as possible. “We had to hurry and excavate before word got out and looters arrived,” Loenne says.
Over the course of three months, they found a Roman-era battlefield spread over more than a mile of dense German forest. Standing under towering pines on Monday, Loenne said the battlefield may be one of the largest ever discovered intact from that era.
Metal detector hobbyists working under the watchful eye of Loenne and her team located over 600 metal objects, from Roman sandal nails to arrowheads and six-inch long iron spear points that once capped javelins fired from ballistae, a sort of giant crossbow.
The hill where clash took place, known as Harzhorn, is about 40 miles due south of Hannover. Coins and radiocarbon evidence indicate a date in the first half of the Third Century A.D. The article, in the fashion typical of modern journalism, tries to turn these facts into an historical mystery. Harzhorn, it claims, is “hundreds of miles north of the Roman frontier”. In fact, consultation with the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World shows that the distance to the imperial limes was no more than a hundred miles, less than a week’s march for legionnaires, and this was no quiet frontier. In 213 the Emperor Caracalla turned back an invasion by the Alamanni, and border raids were endemic. Rome had long ago decided against trying to make trans-Rhenish Germany a province, but it had a keen interest in what went on there.
If an archeologist quoted by Spiegel correctly gauges the numbers involved – “about a thousand men on the Roman side” – the attacking troops were a reinforced cohort, a unit that might have been dispatched to pursue barbarian raiders, intervene in behalf of a well-disposed chieftain or avenge an insult to Roman honor.
Aside from its intrinsic interest, this find reminds us that the past is filled with events of which we have no inkling. Our knowledge of German affairs between 200 and 250 A.D. might fill a full page if one used large type and wide margins, yet it was in fact a turbulent place and time. The small expedition to Harzhorn was, we may be sure, far from the only incident of this kind – deeds lost to our memory but as real as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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