Archaeologists have unearthed the world’s oldest and most complete set of Roman body armour yet on a battlefield where Germanic tribesmen wiped out three of their legions in AD9.
The discovery of an entire cuirass — a piece of armour where the breastplate and back plate are fastened together — of “lorica segmentata” at Kalkriese in northwestern Germany tells a gruesome personal story about the man who wore it and provides new insights into Roman military technology, researchers said.
The archaeologist Stefan Burmeister, the director of the museum at Kalkriese, the presumed site of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, said that the Roman soldier may have been sacrificed by German warriors after the battle.
A Roman “shrew’s fiddle”, a form of
