![]() As they dug over the course of nearly 15 years, they uncovered specialty workshops for ceramics and smithing, and administrative buildings made of local stone and timber from the thick forests nearby. The excavators began to realize that the site might be something else entirely. “We found buildings that had nothing to do with the military,” says von Schnurbein, “and we still haven’t found anything resembling a barracks.” As the Waldgirmes excavations progressed, though, archaeologists began to question their initial assumptions. “The military interpretation here is so strong that at first we didn’t think it could be anything else,” Rasbach says. The Roman army, fresh from its conquest of Gaul and bent on further dominion, had been active all across Germany, and the distinctive straight lines of Roman military camps are familiar to German archaeologists. “It was clearly just like a Roman military camp,” says archaeologist Siegmar von Schnurbein, who was the director of the commission during the Waldgirmes excavation.Īlthough the discoveries were exciting, they were not necessarily surprising. Ground-penetrating radar surveys revealed carefully planned streets, the foundations of wooden buildings, and postholes that are evidence of 10-foot-tall timber walls. When German Archaeological Institute archaeologist Gabriele Rasbach started working at the site in 1993, she and her colleagues assumed they had found a military installation. What they uncovered was a Roman site they call Waldgirmes, after a nearby modern town. In the 1980s, the chance discovery of sherds of Roman-style pottery on a farm in the Lahn Valley near Frankfurt led archaeologists and historians at the German Archaeological Institute’s Romano-Germanic Commission to begin excavations. But what if there’s more to it than that? The conventional wisdom goes that after a decades-long attempt to conquer the region east of the Rhine River finally failed in A.D. ![]() Some of the bloodiest military engagements pitted Rome against the inhabitants of Germania, who are described by contemporary sources of the time as a loose confederation of uncivilized, quarrelsome, warlike, ferocious tribes to the north. The oft-told tale of the Roman Empire’s expansion is one of violent conquest-its ever-widening borders pushed forward at sword point by Roman legions. ![]()
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