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As construction crews churned up dirt to renovate a football pitch in Vienna last October, they happened upon an unprecedented find: a heap of intertwined skeletal remains in a mass grave dating to the first-century Roman empire, most likely the bodies of warriors killed in a battle involving Germanic tribes.
This week, after archaeological analysis, experts at the Vienna Museum gave a first public presentation of the grave – linked to “a catastrophic event in a military context” and evidence of the first known fighting in that region.
The bodies of 129 people have been confirmed at the site in the Vienna neighbourhood of Simmering. The excavation teams also found many dislocated bones and believe the total number of bodies could exceed 150 – a discovery they said would be unprecedented in central Europe.
Michaela Binder, who led the archaeological dig, said: “Within the context of Roman acts of war, there are no comparable finds of fighters. There are huge battlefields in Germany where weapons were found. But finding the dead, that is unique for the entire Roman history.”
Soldiers in the Roman empire were typically cremated until the third century.
The pit where the bodies were deposited suggests a hasty or disorganised dumping of corpses. Every skeleton examined showed signs of injury – to the head, torso and pelvis in particular.
Kristina Adler-Wölfl, the head of the Vienna city archaeological department, said: “They have various different battle wounds, which rules out execution. It is truly a battlefield. There are wounds from swords, lances; wounds from blunt trauma.”
The dead are all male. Most were aged 20 to 30 years old and generally showed signs of good dental health.
Carbon-14 analysis helped date the bones to between AD80 and AD130. That was cross-checked against artefacts found in the grave – armour, helmet cheek protectors and nails used in distinctive Roman military shoes known as caligae.
One of the biggest clues was the presence of a dagger of a type in use specifically between the middle of the first century and the start of the second.
So far, only one victim has been confirmed as a Roman legionary. Archaeologists hope DNA and strontium isotope analysis will help further identify the fighters, and whose side they were on.
Adler-Wölfl said: “The most likely theory at the moment is that this is connected to the Danube campaigns of Emperor Domitian – that’s 86 to 96 AD.”
The archaeologists said they had also found signs of the founding of the settlement that would become Vienna.
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