The pits tally with Roman accounts of how an army under commander Germanicus discovered the battlefield in AD 16 and buried the piles of bleached bones strewn across it. GentschĮight pits containing the bones of men aged 20 to 45 have been found, with many skulls showing gaping holes. Coins discovered at the site are no more recent than 9 AD Image: picture-alliance/dpa/F. Some historians still have their doubts about Kalkriese and say it could be the site of a later battle, but the circumstantial evidence in favor of it has been piling up steadily over the years. 'We're hoping for some piece of a helmet with an inscription or a plaque with the name of a unit, or a stamped artillery bolt.' 'We haven't got final proof we haven't found anything with the inscription of the 19th or 18th or 17th legions,' Professor Salvatore Ortisi, a specialist on provincial Roman archaeology at the University of Munich who is heading the dig, told DW. In a fresh attempt to find answers, the local Kalkriese Museum will start a major new excavation on September 4 and has launched a three-year project to analyze the metallurgical make-up of items discovered so far. They have amassed a trove of evidence, such as human bones with terrible wounds, hundreds of coins, spear tips, lead sling-bullets, fragments of Roman armor, belt buckles, tent pegs, sandal nails, surgical instruments and a spectacular face mask from a cavalryman's helmet (first picture in the gallery above).īut they have yet to find irrefutable proof that the site near the village of Kalkriese, a low-lying area of woods and fields some 15 kilometers (over nine miles) northeast of Osnabrück, really is the location of that battle.Īlso, questions remain over the sequence of events in the fighting that is believed to have started with ambushes on the thin Roman column snaking through the forest before culminating at Kalkriese in a bottleneck between a hill and a moor. Read more: Germany's sunken 'Atlantis' reappears as tourist attraction It sent a shockwave through the Roman Empire, spawned the first German hero, and is seen by some historians as the main reason why Rome refrained from colonizing the regions north and east of the Rhine River.Īrguably, it explains why Germany to this day is divided into the Roman-influenced, Catholic and - some would say - more fun-loving South and West, and the rougher, cooler Protestant North and East.Įver since the 1987 discovery of the presumed battlefield in northwestern Germany, archaeologists have been trying to piece together how Arminius defeated three highly-trained Roman legions under General Publius Quinctilius Varus, governor of Germania, in four days of carnage. The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, in which Germanic tribes under the Cheruscan warlord Arminius, later idealized as Hermann, annihilated a Roman army of up to 18,000 men in the year AD 9, has gone down in history as the big bang that created the German nation.

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