There has been a research controversy for years about the ancient battlefield found in Kalkriese near Osnabrück in the late 1980s: was the lost Roman army, whose remains can be seen here, subordinate to the governor Publius Quinctilius Varus, who was lured into a trap by the Germans under Arminius – or by the Roman general Nero Claudius Germanicus, who six years later, i.e. 15 AD, undertook a campaign of revenge in the area and, according to historiography, also got into trouble.

Uwe Ebbinghaus

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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There was much to be said for Varus and the legions 17 to 19 in his service, but clear evidence is lacking.

The coins found there point to the Varus period, but Germanicus could have paid his soldiers with older money;

the other archaeological finds could not be narrowed down to six years.

But the many hundreds of finds from Roman times that have been excavated in Kalkriese allow for another approach: the metallurgical investigation that the Varus Battle Museum in Kalkriese has now carried out in a joint research project with the German Mining Museum in Bochum.

The method is quite new. A few years ago, Pablo Fernández Reyes from the University of Liverpool applied it to finds from the period between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD in a work on "Legion sites in Great Britain".

In Kalkriese, artefacts from the three decades between about 15 BC and 15 AD are now the focus of interest.

The concept was to compare a "metallurgical fingerprint" resulting from the analysis of the finds in Kalkriese with both non-ferrous metal artefacts from the Roman camps of Dangstetten and Haltern, where the 19th Legion was proven to be stationed, and with those that assigned to the Germanicus Legions 2, 13, 20 and 21.

Exciting questions remain unanswered

The fingerprint, which is the issue here, should not be imagined as a closed set of features that "corresponds to a DIN standard", as Annika Diekmann says in an interview with the FAZ - she dedicated her dissertation to the topic as a research assistant in Bochum – but as a “characteristic composition of chemical trace elements” in hundreds of studied artefacts made of Roman non-ferrous metals such as bronze and brass.

The starting point was the assumption that the metals of Roman legions in the form of weapons, fibulae or belt buckles, which were subject to a constant recycling process due to permanent repairs, can be assigned to a specific manuscript.

Pablo Fernández Reyes already provided evidence of this.

Every legion forge forges differently - and both the process they use and the chemical elements that adhere to tools and metals used for repairs, for example, reveal a pattern over a longer period of time, which project manager Stefan Burmeister described as "a kind of statistical mean”.

The fingerprint calculated in Kalkriese, which, according to Annika Diekmann, is characterized by a "very specific antimony and nickel content", now showed such significant similarities with the findings in Dangstetten and Haltern, i.e. the 19th Legion, and also such large differences the Germanicus legions that overall, according to Stefan Burmeister, it can be interpreted as "another strong indication of Kalkriese as the site of the Varus Battle".

But things remain exciting in Kalkriese.

It is still unclear how Varus' army was able to go down so mercilessly, whether the ramparts that are still recognizable can be assigned to the Germans or the Romans and whether Germanicus was not also on the Oberesch in Kalkriese on his campaign for revenge.

The question also remains unanswered as to what happened to legions 17 and 18, of which archaeological traces have so far been lacking.

Should these emerge one day, metallurgical investigations could close further gaps and add new aspects to the history of Germania shortly after the turning point.