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Kalkriese has nothing to do with the Teutoburg battles
#31
Quote:There is a lead plumb bob from Kalkriese with an "I" on it, and several other finds with either an "I" or a "P" on them...
What did it weigh? "I (libra) p(ondo)" (1 pound in weight)? Smile
posted by Duncan B Campbell
https://ninth-legion.blogspot.com/
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#32
Quote:I meant: LPA: What else besides Legio Prima Augusta? ^^

Could it be an initials of a person, for instance, L(ucius) P(oblicius) A(quila)?
Though it is not improbable that this abbreviation mentions a legion. It reminds me a lead ingots from a late I BC shipwreck at Comacchio with stamps LPRI and IPRMA.
Marcus Tineius Valens, mil. coh. II Matt. eq.
/Oleg Tiniaev/
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.auxilia.ru">www.auxilia.ru
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#33
Greetings to all,
I will freely admit that I belong to the pro-Kalkriese camp. That does not mean that I have a closed mind however, as my near obsessive interest in the Batlle of the Teutoburg Forest goes way back (to when I was 9 years old! - and that was a long, long time ago). I, personally, have never seen Kalkriese as THE SITE of the battle, but rather as A SITE along with possible others in the running 3 or 4 days' long battle, assuming that our only extant account of the actual battle, from Cassius Dio, is reasonably accurate with regard to its duration. Those others are yet to be found - and may never be found.
I have gotten quite interested in the discoveries in what is being called "Fields of Conflict Archaeology". My expedition to the Yale University libraries earlier in April allowed me to look at some of the collected papers in journals in this field. Finding battlefields, especially ancient ones, with any kind of artifact left, seems to be rare - maybe even extremely rare. The bones found on the site are of great to me, and I wish more was available in English on what the forensics tell us about them. To find a female skeleton among them is no great stretch. After all, Varus' army had a large civilian presence and some of them were surely still alive at the end (wherever that took place). My guess is that captured civilians would be more likely to end as slaves rather than sacrifices, unlike the military personnel. In the articles I've seen of more recent date, there is discussion of looting - for which the Germans had plenty of time to strip the dead and search the battlefield.
I have seen information calling into question the VAR countermarks, but to the best of my knowledge the coins found to date including the catalogued information on the stolen coins have none of them of the 10 AD series. They all predate that series. So, even if the countermark means something else,...
Obviously, the Romans and Germans fought each other time and again during the long process from Drusus to Varus and including Germanicus, and after. The Germans certainly got in some good "licks" against the Romans.
The connection to a legion I all the way back to Pyrrhus seems a big stretch (the chest hook owned by M Aius - mentioning Fabricius)- that predates Hannibal - and the legions had no regimental history at that early date. That would be legion I in a particular consul's series. They were usually disbanded back then. We do know that legionaries included their centurions' names on their equipment (and on their tombstones as well). The palisade stakes found at Oberadan including centurial markings. They are hard to read in the photos I've seen so I am deferring to the experts on that one.
What are the theories out there for other conflicts to which Kalkriese might be connected? I would be interested in what other information there is out there. My German being sketchy at best, and more technical stuff being tough to translate even when German is readable at a low "conversational" level, some English translation would be helpful to me and I know to other English speakers.
Quinton Johansen
Marcus Quintius Clavus, Optio Secundae Pili Prioris Legionis III Cyrenaicae
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#34
Quote:I have seen information calling into question the VAR countermarks, but to the best of my knowledge the coins found to date including the catalogued information on the stolen coins have none of them of the 10 AD series. They all predate that series. So, even if the countermark means something else,...
This is often used as argument, but it is none, speaking strictly methodologically.
1. Coins can NEVER provide anything but a terminus post quem. We cannot use absence of evidence as evidence. It is clear that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, BUT it is not evidence either.
2. We do by far not know enough about the circulation of money in Ancient Rome to be able to see whether the freshly minted coins would have reached the Caecina troops in relevant numbers at all before their departure to Germania. Currently it looks like the new minted coins only went to Raetia and Southern Gaeul at that time, there seem to be some fixed dates which make this plausible. Publication about this is coming soon.
3. The Kalkriese coin horizon was linked by Berger to the Haltern horizon, whch was thought to be clear 9 AD terminus ante quem. Recent investigations and excavations have shown that the Haltern horizon seems to go up to 15 or 16 AD, so the statement about Kalkriese would have normally to be automatically adjusted.
4. The relevant coins are also found (almost) nowhere in camps which most probably belong to the 15 /16 AD camps. Maybe there was no need along the Rhine for the fresh coins, so they simply don´t show up because they weren´t brought there yet at the time? We don´t know yet.
Christian K.

No reconstruendum => No reconstruction.

Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas.
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#35
That wall has always bothered me. The palisade the Kalkriese museum topped their reconstruction with is completely spurious- nothing of the sort has been found. Also, the wall is constructed with chalk blocks within to stabalize it, and the ditch is on the uphill side. Pretty elaborate for a temporary expedient, true? I once owned a small apartment complex at the base of a hill, in an area with clay soil, subject to heavy spring and fall rains. What we did to protect the building from water running down the hill was to construct a low earth wall with a shallow ditch on the uphill side that was parallel to the building- the idea being to direct the runoff around the building. The wall was about 50-60 meters long, and it worked like a charm.

The Kalkriese wall is ideally suited to this same purpose- to direct the runoff water to set 'channels' across the track (and thus harmlessly into the downhill bog area) that ran parallel to the hill- said channels being bridged over with simple planks. Even though the museum seems to have overlooked this, the archaeological plan clearly shows breaks in the wall ideally suited to this purpose. Remember, this is an area of clayey soil unsuited to the absorbtion of water- and that track along the base of the Kalkriese hill was the only way tribesfolk could travel east-west in the entire region. It would have been important enough for the locals to take measures to prevent it from being washed over during rainy periods. One sees this sort of solution all over the place up here in New England where I live.

Frankly, the whole idea of a pre-positioned (and well-constructed, no less!) wall is an absurdity to my mind. Even assuming that Arminus was a true military genius (and he would have to have been such if a lot of modern reconstructions of the Varusschlacht are to be believed), it'd be quite a stretch for him to 'just know' that the roman column would wind up just where he expected, many many kilometers from their encampment in the Minden area!

I'm appending below an excerpt of a talk I gave a few years ago on the Varruschlacht which sums up my thoughts on the matter:

"Anyway, what happened was this: for many years farmers in the Kalkriese area had been turning up bits and pieces of Roman military gear, to the point that in 1996 a team of archaeologists from the nearby University of Osanbreuk decided to have a good look round.

Almost immediately, they began digging up impressive amounts of material, of which the most important were buried-hoards of newly-minted Roman coins dated conclusively to the year 9AD. In the same vicinity as these were found mass human burials, along with an ever-increasing pile of all sorts of Roman military gear. Moreover, narrowly sandwiched as it was between a wooded mountain and an extensive bog, not only was the terrain tailor-made for the Varusschlacht as described in the primary literary sources, but the lie of the finds suggested a disorganized flight of folks from east to west- the direction the Romans would have been taking if attempting to flee back to secure territory. Well, with this a great cry of 'AHA' went up all across the land, and an expensive new museum instantly sprang up in the heretofore one-horse village of Kalkriese. The site- or more specifically the end-point- of the Varusschlacht had been conclusively found.

Well, maybe yes and maybe no. Afterall, this is the sort of thing that scholarly reputations rise and fall upon, and then there are all those Gasthaus reservations and museum entrance fees to consider. In other words, there is a fair amount of in-fighting and politiking going on amongst the academic and/or civically-minded types in Germany, and safe to say not everyone has accepted the Kalkriese site as the final word in the matter."

Ed Valerio
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