U of Minnesota professor investigates ancient battlefield

Andrew Sain Staff

In the year 9 CE, three Roman legions, 15,000 troops in total, were attacked and destroyed by German tribespeople in the Teutoberg Forest. Despite its relatively recent discovery, this battlefield is on its way to becoming the best-researched ancient battle site in the world, according to Peter S. Wells.

In his Feb. 3 lecture, Wells, a professor at the University of Minnesota, informed students of the details of this particular military encounter, as well as some techniques used in analysing ancient battlefields. The author of The Battle That Stopped Rome, Wells received his BA and PhD from Harvard University, and his MA from the University of Tübingen. He was introduced as “one of the real giants of Roman archaeology.”

The cause of the ancient defeat: underestimation of other cultural groups, in particular the cultures of barbarian groups, according to Wells, who explained the lesson to be learned.

“The fundamental problem . . . was a Roman inability to understand other cultural groups, an inability to understand that other societies could look very different from Rome, yet be no less effective, in this case, in military action.”

The plan of the Germanic tribes, as it appears according to Wells, was to lure Roman legions into a narrow pass between a large bog and a forested hill, where they would then be ambushed. One of the key discoveries on the site is a wall that was built along the edge of the adjoining forest.

“The assumption now is that [the wall] was built as a plan for this attack — purposely built, which would be unusual because these groups were not building a lot of earthworks otherwise,” he said. He added that a predominant theory is that the German soldiers hid behind the camouflaged wall in order to ambush the columns of unsuspecting soldiers.

Most of the artifacts recovered from the site are small, such as coins, arrowheads, pieces of uniforms and sandal nails. These items still have use to archaeologists, however, as the researchers used the dates on the coins to verify that this battleground is in fact the one they were searching for.

Wells stressed that few artifacts from the battleground remain; the investigation into the site has to take into account the inevitable scavenging that took place after ancient conflicts, when the victors took most items of value.

One of the most important archaeological finds on the site is a beautiful iron Roman ceremonial mask, which, despite having been stripped of its silver coating, has been preserved to the present.

Wells predicts that the site, discovered in 1987, will continue to be studied for several decades to come.