Roman-era battlefield mass grave discovered under Vienna football pitch

Archaeologists say ‘catastrophic military event’ took place at site where 129 bodies have been found so far

As construction crews churned up dirt to renovate a football pitch in Vienna last October, they happened upon an unprecedented find: a heap of intertwined skeletal remains in a mass grave dating to the first-century Roman empire, most likely the bodies of warriors killed in a battle involving Germanic tribes.

This week, after archaeological analysis, experts at the Vienna Museum gave a first public presentation of the grave – linked to “a catastrophic event in a military context” and evidence of the first known fighting in that region.