In a quiet neighborhood of Vienna, the silence was broken by a shocking discovery: during the renovation of a football field in the district of Simmeringthe workers came across one of the most significant archaeological finds of the Roman era. One came to light under the grassy mantle Common pit containing the skeletal remains of over 150 young menpiled up in a disordered way and hastily covered with earth.
The bodies, all male and mostly aged between 20 and 30 years of age, have unusually healthy dentitions and numerous signs of cutting and impact trauma. The wounds detected on skulls, busts and also pelvis leave no doubt: These men died fighting, not executed.
Swords of sword and shattered armor
Kristina Adler-Wölfldirector of the Department of Urban Archeology of Vienna, told the Guardian that the type of wounds found – Swords, Lancia strokes, lesions from blunt weapons and even dartes – excludes any hypothesis of execution. According to the scholar, it is in all respects a battlefield.
The disordered arrangement of the bodies – some prone makes down, others to go on its side – indicates that The burial was made quicklyperhaps immediately after the fight. The scene tells of a carnage followed by a precipitous coverage of the fallen, without any funeral rite.
During the excavations, Fragments of armor, nails of Roman military footwear, shirts in metal flakes also emerged, And a rusty dagger. An analysis of the X -rays of the sheath revealed finely engraved silver decorations, attributable to the Roman style in use between the middle of the first and the beginning of the second century AD the results of the dating to the radioocarbon They place the event between 80 and 130 AD, a period marked by intense clashes between the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribes along the Danube, under the emperor Domitian.
According to Adler-Wölfl, it is highly probable that the battle dates back to 92 ADduring one of the most bloody military campaigns fought on the northern border.
A unique find in Roman military history
Until today, historians only ordered written sources To reconstruct the Roman-Germanic conflicts along the Danube. But with the discovery of the Simmering pit, For the first time, direct material evidence of those wars emergeas Adler-Wölfl pointed out:
It is the first physical testimony of Germanic wars.
Just seven kilometers from the burial place stood Vindobonaa Roman military outpost that would then evolve in today’s Vienna. Scholars believe that The battle may have triggered a strategic turning pointpushing the emperor Trajan to transform the small camp into a real legionary fortress, strengthening the Danubian Limesthat is, the eastern border of the Roman Empire in Europe.
The discovery also questioned what was thought of Roman funerary practices: the soldiers usually came cremateWhile The intact burials were very rareespecially in the European provinces of the Empire, as Adler-Wölfl reiterated:
Finding Roman skeletons of this period is an exceptional event.
To date, alone One of the fallen has been identified as a Roman legionarythanks to remains of equipment attributable to imperial troops. The others remain anonymous. Are underway Analysis of DNA and isotopes To determine the geographical origin of the soldiers, their diet and, if possible, the provinces of origin.
The anthropologist Michaela Binder, at the head of the excavations conducted by the Novetus GmbH, underlined the uniqueness of the event:
There are great battlefields in Germany where weapons and objects have been found. But finding the fallen, the actual bodies, is an unprecedented fact in Roman military history.
Today, after two millennia of silence, Those young soldiers return to speak. They were overwhelmed by the violence of the war, forgotten under meters of earth, but their memory, finally, re -emerge. And he tells us about brutality, urgency and forgetfulness of an empire in fighting his borders.
