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The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest… brought to a shuddering halt the expansion of the Roman Empire…
Last year, in Vienna, we visited the salt mines at Hallstatt and the site beside the Danube where the Venus of Willendorf was discovered. This year, it has been another archaeological feast that has mixed the archaeology of the Roman frontier with a series of seminars and lectures in the University of Vienna.
On 8 September AD 9, three Roman legions were destroyed at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. This, one of the key events in European history, brought to a shuddering halt the expansion of the Roman Empire under Emperor Augustus. Thereafter, the prospect of defeating the Germanic tribes ended, and for 450 years most of the northern border was fixed on the rivers Rhine and Danube. Known as the Roman limes, this defensive line stretched over 3,000km and bristled with auxiliary forts, legionary fortresses, and watchtowers. Only when the Emperor Trajan seized Dacia, modern Romania, from AD 101, did the formal frontier move beyond the mighty Danube River in eastern Europe.
Vienna itself, ancient Vindobona, was one of the major Roman defensive points on the limes and, yesterday, we drove east to visit another site at Carnuntum. While Vindobona lies under the modern city, Carnuntum is covered with wheat fields, and excavations have revealed a city that once had a population of at least 50,000. It has three major components: a legionary fortress, a fort garrisoned by the ala I Thracum Victrix, one of the crack cavalry units in the Roman army, and a walled city. There are two amphitheatres: one for the populace at large, the other for the army. One of the rare features of Carnuntum is that the houses and baths have been reconstructed on exactly the same locations they stood on 2,000 years ago. We walked through the rooms of a wine merchant’s house and shop, and admired the home of a wealthy resident. In the public baths, hot water steamed in one room over the hypocaust system, and in another there was a cool bath adjacent to the communal lavatory. The foundations of an ancient hotel were conveniently located next to the Roman version of a fast-food shop.
We walked through ripening wheat fields to tour the massive amphitheatre, which could accommodate 13,000 spectators. Carnuntum is now a component of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Roman limes, and its place in the history of the Empire is writ large in imperial visits. In AD 172-175, Marcus Aurelius lived in Carnuntum while directing the Marcomannic wars. Following the death of Commodus in AD 192, the governor of the province of Upper Pannonia, Septimius Severus, was proclaimed Roman Emperor by the army of the Danube limes. And, in AD 308, the future governance of the Empire under Diocletian was determined there. I couldn’t help the sensation of following historic footsteps as we looked down on the now empty amphitheatre.
Tulln is an immaculate Austrian town that also lies on the southern bank of the Danube. It was once Commagenis, a fort housing a cavalry unit that would have been constantly involved in patrolling the frontier. Just strolling through the streets, one came across the stone foundations of the entrance into the fort, and excavations have filled an excellent town museum. However, even the Roman heritage is upstaged by the magnificent Nibelung monument that records in bronze statues the meeting between Kriemhild, the Burgundian queen, and Etzel, the King of the Huns, prior to their betrothal in about AD 1200.
Progress in prehistory
I always feel welcome when I return to the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology in Vienna, and this year I again had the chance to sample a number of fascinating seminars and lectures. The former were delivered by PhD students in their early stages of research. Olivia Francis described how she is working on new radiocarbon dating techniques on bone. This was of personal interest to me because one of her sites, Arcy-sur-Cure, is where I enjoyed a long summer digging in 1955. We worked down through the Aurignacian layers of the Grotte du Renne until we encountered the late Neanderthal occupation and, there, we uncovered the so-called ‘Châtelperronian context’, one containing early bone ornaments that still engender debate as to whether they were crafted by Neanderthals or Anatomically Modern Humans.
I then attended a lecture by Luc Doyon on the origin and development of bone-tool technology, in which he described how he is deploying all the latest analytical methods to identify if a fragment of bone was indeed a tool, and, if so, what was it used for. We always think in terms of a Stone Age, but overlook the many uses for which bone is in fact superior. One of these, for example, is skinning an animal and processing the pelt to make clothing. In this respect, bone knives, scrapers, polishers, and needles are paramount. Of course, our ancestors would never have hunted mammoths without protection from the cold. After his talk, I had the chance to talk to Luc about my experiences at Arcy-sur-Cure, since he excavated there recently. In 1955, a speleologist visited our dig site and asked our director André Leroi-Gourhan for an assignment. Apparently, he had just separated from his girlfriend and wanted to forget about it by doing something dangerous. Leroi motioned him towards a tiny hole at the back of our cave and invited him to explore. He was gone for hours but when he returned, he described a sensational discovery. Luc tells me that, even now, the find remains sealed by the French authorities, so I won’t go into detail about it. Sorry about that.
Sahleselasie Melaku is the Head of the Department of Palaeoanthropology at the National Museum of Ethiopia and is thus in the box seat when it comes to the very latest finds from the northern reaches of the African Rift Valley. In a cooperative research initiative with Gerhard Weber in Vienna, he gave us a fascinating account first of the history of discovery in his country, and then the more recent finds. In his introduction, Gerhard showed images of their discovery of Australopithecine teeth and a large part of a femur. I found that I was sitting beside Bence Viola, who had discovered the femur, and I had no hesitation in shaking his hand.
There are now 13 early hominin species from Ethiopia, two named Ardipithecus and four Australopithecines. Everyone has heard of Lucy, but I for one had never before come across either Selam or Kadanuumuu. At 3.3 million years old, Selam is the best-preserved infant Australopithecine skull found since the Taung child a century ago. When a near-complete foot and other limb bones were added to the collection, Selam became the most complete Australopithecus afarensis known. Kadanuumuu in the Afar language means ‘big man’, and the discovery of this partial skeleton, dating back to 3.6 million years ago, has demonstrated the considerable differences in size between the males and females of this species. As if this wasn’t already enough, we then went back 4.4 million years to view another near-complete skeleton, this time of Ardipithecus. Did these hominins make tools? In 2010, an article in Nature described cut marks on animal bones from the Awash Valley that are evidence of the use of stone cutting-implements at least 3.4 million years ago. This is slightly older than the earliest known actual stone tools from Lomekwi.
At question time, I gave what I hoped was not too long a preamble about Louis Leakey coming to Cambridge in 1961 to tell us about his recent discovery of Homo habilis. At tea, before his presentation, he asked if any of us would like to join him in Africa for some fieldwork. Glyn Isaac was first to raise his hand and not long thereafter, he was finding wonderful things at Olorgesailie. Looking back, I now rather wish that I had been quicker on the uptake, given the flood of new discoveries from the Ethiopian Rift Valley. However, one cannot do everything, and next time I promise to return to the spread of copper technology across Eurasia to the gates of China.
Charles Higham is a Professor at Otago University in New Zealand, and an authority on Cambodia’s Angkor civilisation and Ban Non Wat in Thailand.
