Mass grave of Roman soldiers found under Vienna sports field
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Germanic tribes usually burned their bodies as well. But that does not mean, they feld oblieged to give the enemy a proper rite.
or even three legions, 16,000–20,000 killed. "Teutoburg Forest is considered one of the most important defeats in Roman history, bringing the triumphant period of expansion under Augustus to an abrupt end. It dissuaded the Romans from pursuing the conquest of Germania, and so can be considered one of the most important events in European history."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
Mind you, 0 needs inventing or what happens between 1 and -1 ... oh and -1 needs defining too, whatever that nonsense is!
People haven't somehow magically become cleverer over the recent millennia. We just have some fancier tools these days. I'm sure if you gave a few Romans enough wine and the starting point of "Quid CDI significat?" then you would probably get a decent discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Standard_form:
“The numerals for 4 (IV) and 9 (IX) are written using subtractive notation, where the smaller symbol (I) is subtracted from the larger one (V, or X), thus avoiding the clumsier IIII and VIIII. Subtractive notation is also used for 40 (XL), 90 (XC), 400 (CD) and 900 (CM). These are the only subtractive forms in standard use.
[…]
While subtractive notation for 4, 40, and 400 (IV, XL, and CD) has been the usual form since Roman times [citation needed], additive notation to represent these numbers (IIII, XXXX, and CCCC) very frequently continued to be used, including in compound numbers like 24 (XXIIII), 74 (LXXIIII), and 490 (CCCCLXXXX).[12] The additive forms for 9, 90, and 900 (VIIII,[9] LXXXX, and DCCCC) have also been used, although less often“
Flour was ground by stone, tiny pieces of stone made its way into the bread, and the stone stripped the enamel from teeth.
My dad and grandad would laugh at this. 500ml/day is rookie numbers in the former Roman parts of Eastern Europe.
Because they (and many other people) drank more than that, doesn't mean it's a good diet. The Romans drank they wine cut with water though I think.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...
And yes, this was a real thing.
However, besides the more expensive honey, boiled concentrated grape juice was widely used as a sweetener, for most purposes where today sugar would be used.
Grape juice concentrated and sterilized by boiling has been used for millennia as the main sweetener instead of the more expensive honey, and in most cases the vessels used for boiling must have been made of healthier materials, e.g. bronze in the more ancient times, then cheaper brass during the Roman times.
In the warmer countries of the Middle East, boiled concentrated date juice was used instead of grape juice.
> the human remains likely belonged to soldiers who died during a battle involving ancient Roman legionaries.
Doesn’t say which side they were on. The most direct bit seems to be
> X-ray images of the sheath revealed typical ancient Roman decorations: silver wire inlays […]
But a German could just have traded with a Roman at some point.
Of course, the headline says they are Roman soldiers. I wonder if it is hard to tell definitively.
Whole genetic sequencing cost about $500. So <$75,000 for the sequencing of the entire 150, plus scientist time to gather samples and process results. Answering the question through genetics probably costs more than $250,000 even with cheap grad student labor, so it's probably just not worth it, especially when the moral high ground is to let the dead rest.
You can do simpler procedures to find their general regional origin, although it always requires more work in those conditions.
Edit: Wien Museum press release says they're doing DNA and isotope analysis, but doesn't say the concrete techniques applied.
This can be reconstructed, but it requires a much larger sample than normal DNA analysis. (You need to get enough fragments to get a whole genome, with enough overlap everywhere that you can reassemble the pieces.)
The largest problem after that is that the vast majority of DNA in all your samples will not be human DNA, but DNA of the various bacteria that live in the soil. This doesn't ruin the sample, because you can just reconstruct everything and then discard all the things that are not human chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA, but it does greatly increase the workload when compared to a pure human DNA sample.
There are a lot of smaller problems that I am eliding here. But amazingly, all the problems are solvable, and the progress in this field in just the past decade is staggering. We have usable fragments that teach us new things that are >500kyr old, the oldest complete human genome we now have is ~45kyr old, and more recent samples are solving hundred-years-old historical debates, and new ones are done almost daily. We are living in the golden age of archaeogenetics, and many papers published today on it will be cited for a hundred years or more.
... but all the solutions to those problems create a lot more work, and thus a lot more cost than those $500 gene sequencing kits.
No one seems to think of these types of things, especially in todays world where everything is digital and even in places like America there will be nothing left but rather uninteresting rubbish piles of plastic and other toxic remains left where stick and drywall houses and junky metal warehouses used to be.
There will be no silver lined sheathes of common soldiers, no coins of any kind, let alone gold ones, there will be no hidden manuscripts, not even charred scrolls that could be recovered with the use of AI. There will not even be any buildings and castles that stood the test of time for 1000 years, or any new pyramids because it rich and successful don’t build grand and permanent anythings. Humanity will effectively have not only left a huge hole in history starting in about the 1980s, but there won’t even be anything left to discover in the ground from the past the way we are going. And worst, even the digital history is clearly starting to come under attack with censorship and deletion and even the IP rules where corporations just get to delete what they dem you should no longer have.
Where you should put your horizon is Psyche 16.
Space-factories building Starships for everyone. New iPhones dropping from the sky.
Earth, returned to Eden.
Auxiliaries might be closer to slaves than soldiers and mercenaries might have fewer rights than auxiliaries. The devil is in the details. Auxiliaries might be granted Roman Citizenship at commencement or after a period of service.
In general the policy was to deploy aux. from the other end of the empire to augment your top troops in a particular war theatre. Mercs were used to top up if available - think of them as Uber or Lyft when you've run out of decent taxis 8)
Ideally you'd expend your aux and mercs carefully, to keep your real killers (heavy infantry) going. However its just not that simple, depending on what you (Roman General) had at your disposal in terms of troops. It also depended on you not being daft and throwing your cavalry up hill at pointy sticks or whatever. "Skirmishers" can also be devastating:
The Germans (have a look at my username - yes I'm English) german - might mean spearman (I was told this by a bloke from Bayern). They were skirmishers - no armour and a big pointy stick and a buckler shield. They brought low several Roman legions.
Anyway. The term Legionary is a tricky one. And so is German and quite a few other terms here.
I also wondered about the power extension reels, looks like two of them are the REV model shown here: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07KKQMVLW although one is a bit battered and the outer blue plate has fallen off.