2,000 Years Varus Battle

20 Years of Excavations at Kalkriese 

Immediately following the end of the big events at the museum’s park, the excavation campaign 2009 started. On June 23 – while the grandstand and tents were being disassembled – the shovel excavator of company Schröder from Venne with its driver Heinrich … appeared on the scene to create two new excavation sections: one West of the »landscape section«, lying Northward in close proximity to an excavation site from 1992/93, and one in the assumed course of the wall construction, a bit further to the Southwest. Whereas the larger section (section 47) in front of the wall served to examine the distribution of Roman finds as well as the traces of a settlement dating to the pre-Roman Iron Age discovered in the early 1990s, the section running through the wall (section 46) served to assess the exact course of the wall and both the distribution and types of Roman finds in this sector of the battlefield. The excavated area covers almost 1,000 square meters. Thus it is bigger than the sections examined in previous years: The impressive number of more than 140 volunteers and student research assistant made an examination of this scope possible.

The Medieval Esch layer, which is more than half a meter thick in this part of the »Oberesch«, was removed with the shovel excavator’s help. This procedure already brought a couple of Roman artifacts to the surface, which were identified with the metal detector. What followed was handiwork: For four months, the helpers shoveled, sifted and cut through the soil in search for artifacts under the guidance of excavation technician Axel Thiele, prospection technician Klaus Fehrs and excavation assistant Johannes Füchtenbusch, supported by a number of experienced students. As a result, the field work in both sections could be completed in time before the winter after the profiles and finds had been documented.

The soil of section 47 was disturbed by numerous uprooted trees. Therefore only a small number of findings – single posts, a hearth and some pits that most likely served as storage pits – could be identified in the prehistoric settlement area. More than 2,000 pottery fragments that have been found in this year alone point at settlers in this area during the later pre-Roman Iron Age. However, the settlement had been abandoned several decades before the battle. In addition, single older shards and finely crafted arrowheads made of flint stone indicate a use of the area around the end of the Neolithic. A shaft end made of flint stone is proof of the presence of human beings as early as at the end of the Paleolithic (about 10,000 BC). Many of the small flint stone artifacts have only been found because the volunteers were so alert while the sifting through the sand.

The same can be said for some small metal finds that could not be identified via metal detectors because they were completely corroded. One example thereof is a three-blade iron arrowhead; a trace of the conflicts between Germanic people and Romans. The majority of Roman metal findings came to light when the soil was removed layer by layer and searched with the metal detector: silver and copper coins, several fibulas, horse harness pendants, belt buckles, studs and numerous small nails from soldiers’ sandals, moreover very rusty iron parts that will be probably be identified as iron projectiles, spear butts, pilum collets and iron rings. The restoration results remain yet to be seen. A few single finds of horse or mule teeth are most likely also assignable to the battle activities. Whether some small burned bone fragments, which were found in a high concentration in one spot of section 47, are to be seen in the battle’s context or belong to the prehistoric settlement (possibly being food remains or indicators of burials), will be verified only based on scientific analyses of the bone material.

Much clearer results than those from section 47 were obtained from the findings in section 46, because these proved that so far the reconstruction of the wall’s layout is correct: Material of the wall was preserved up to a height of about 20 cm and could be seen exactly in the places where the wall was believed to have been. The Northeast to Southwest alignment was not only proven by the existing wall material, but also by the drainage ditch known from other sections of the wall, which ran parallel to the construction’s South side. The ditch was mostly filled with material from the wall that had caved in after the battle. In this part of the ditch objects identifiable as Roman military equipment have been found.

Various conferences in late summer (the congress in Osnabrück, the symposium of the Nordwestdeutsche Verband für Altertumsforschung in Detmold, the meeting of excavation technicians from Lower-Saxony and neighboring regions) offered an opportunity to present these interesting findings to colleagues. In addition, in the course of excursions during exhibition visits to Detmold, Haltern and Kalkriese, many lecturers and students of archaeology and history, both from German and foreign universities, took the chance of obtaining information about the excavation results on the respective sites and to discuss research methods in battlefield archaeology developed at Kalkriese. However, the excavation team also dedicated a lot of time to visitors with no background in archaeology: Between July and October, the current excavation and its progress were explained to an interested audience on weekdays from noon until 12:30 pm directly on site. The amount of feedback was unexpectedly high, and the visitors’ curiosity often made it difficult for Klaus Fehrs and Axel Thiele, who took turns in answering questions, to end the “Q&A session” and return to their work on the excavation site.

The work conditions in this summer were extremely hard for the excavation team, in particular for the volunteering excavation assistants: It was either very hot or very wet due to torrential rainfall. Nevertheless, the helpers stayed in good spirits, even though most of them were not used to such physical exertion, and continued to work tirelessly. The high number of preregistrations for the next excavation campaign clearly shows that they still enjoy this kind of work.

The members of the Kalkriese team will now return to their desks – not just to work on the documentation of the last few excavation sections and to inventory the finds, but primarily to prepare a publication with the results of the past few years’ evaluations. The focus of this work will be the question when the different sections of the wall construction caved in or were destroyed: as early as during the battle activities or later on, over time, as the result of natural erosion processes? After more than twenty years’ research, this year’s excavations have contributed to a more precise evaluation of the events that took place at the Oberesch. Future archaeological examinations should focus more strongly on other sections of the more than 30 square kilometer big battlefield.