Roman battlefield found deep inside Germany

[mcbishop]

GREAT -- now we're having a discussion.

Hi Mike,
...whereas I can follow your reservations against the recent finds to a certain extent,
I think one would be hard-pressed to offer reasonable arguments for the case that the
earlier finds were NOT made in a battleground context. :roll:

Mainly a gut feeling, I admit, but the spectrum of finds seems too rich (there even appears to be a cobbler's last in one picture!). It comes down ultimately to those Rumsfeldian 'unknown unknowns' (stuff we don't know we don't know) and trying to shoehorn a deposit into a rather crude 'battlefield' model. Kalkriese (since it has been mentioned once or twice) appears to be an excellent example of how taphonomic processes complicate and obfuscate a nice simple story (Romans ambushed, drop all their stuff) into a more complex one (stuff dropped, moved around and picked over, tidied up by Germanicus etc) so that it may not be 'the' Varusschlacht site, might be 'a' VS site, but may well be one of many VS sites (others yet to be found: unknown unknowns), all of which all-too-easily becomes 'we've found the site of The Battle of X!' (not deliberately, but simply because the processes involved are more complex than have been reconstructed or even can be reconstructed from the archaeological evidence). A battlefield never ever leaves a nice neat snapshot in the archaeological record, any more than Pompeii is a snapshot of everyday life around the Bay of Naples.

Artefacts are tricksy little devils and you have to box 'em on the ears and smack 'em on the bum to show 'em who's boss and, even then, they may flatter to deceive.

Hence my doubts :-D

Mike Bishop