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Why no battered helmets?
#16
-It has been stated by the ancient sources that Varus' army was more a disorderly mob than an army, with civilians and soldiers mixed together. Which BTW adds weight the theory that he was retreating to the Rhine, becaiuse of the rebellion, not going to quell it.<br>
-The atmosphere of panic in a roman camp or in a roman army under siege has been described in great details. For example Sabinus and Cotta in Caesar's War of the Gauls.<br>
-In the third day of a running battle under a driving rain, there was no scouts anymore, Dan, I'm afraid.<br>
-If there ever had been. If the Romans were adept at scouting, some of them were also superbly ignoring it. Examples abound about it.<br>
-What was left was just a crowd of terrified, very wet people, pulling along a few mules --and numerous wounded-- with them. No nice Flavius Josephus type parade here: the heavy baggage was not in the middle of anything, it had been abandoned the day before. See above about the atmosphere of panic and imagine. A single mule doeth not a mule train makes. Think about Napoleon's Grand Army on the way back from Russia, not on the way in...<br>
-The pit bone is a mass grave from the period. That's all that can be said of it. The human remains are at the bottom, under a layer of animal bones.<br>
-However, it is obvious that all the bodies from the massacre could not have been collected. Besides, as was their custom in cases of urgency (see the siege at Flevum), the dead were certainly buried along the way in shallow graves. There were probably bodies scattered almost all the way to Varus' camp on the Weser area<br>
-When Germanicus came to visit the site it was already several years later, and animals pick up and crush bones too. There were bears, lynxes, wolves and other assorted scavengers and predators in the area then.<br>
It was more a religious rite and a symbolic gesture than anything else: they moved in, picked up what they could, gathered the remnants they found around and buried them.<br>
-The wall is definitely not a roman wall, on the contrary it fits perfectly the description from the ancient sources. Those sources tell us of Varus' last camp, which looked to Germanicus as hastily built with a shallow ditch. It has probably disappeared but it may have been somewhere around the entrance of the gauntlet. The wall found after 2000 years looks like much more than a hastily built wall with a shallow ditch.<br>
-Lastly: given the fact that this area is one of the most populated on Earth and has been built and rebuilt and trodded upon and cultivated time and again, I think we're bloody lucky to have found that much after 2000 years.<br>
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