TT talk #12 January 2022 : Susanne Wilburs-Rost & Achim Rost - Kalkriese

In their own words:

"Since 1987 archaeological investigations have been taking place at Kalkriese near Osnabrück in Northern Germany. Many Roman coins and pieces of military equipment have been found in a narrow passage between the Wiehen Mountains and the Great Bog. They allow to interpret the site as the battle of the year 9 AD (the so-called Battle in the Teutoburg Forest), in which three Roman legions under the command of Varus were totally defeated in an ambush by an alliance of Germanic tribes under the leadership of Arminius.

At the main site, called “Oberesch”, more than 5000 fragments of Roman equipment, a rampart, and pits with bones of soldiers killed in action and animals from the baggage train were unearthed. Beyond this one, many sites with Roman military finds were discovered during field surveys and excavations, some of them in the area of contemporary Germanic settlements. Insofar our research deals with a large conflict landscape of more than 30 square kilometres where the battle took place: it was a battle in a defile, not a static warfare.

The extensive and long-term investigations at Kalkriese opened the chance for the development of methodological frameworks for battlefield archaeology, quite a young research approach. The talk will demonstrate the results of 30 years of research at the site Oberesch and in the wider conflict landscape. We will present the most important finds and features and explain which events and behaviour patterns can be deduced from the archaeological remains. "