Vienna archaeologists reveal mass grave of fighters in Roman Empire-era battle

A man works on the excavation of a Roman mass grave from the end of the 1st century AD in the Simmering district of Vienna, Austria (Reiner Riedler, Wien Museum via AP)

As construction crews churned up dirt to renovate a Vienna football field last October, they happened upon an unprecedented find: a heap of intertwined skeletal remains in a mass grave dating to the 1st-century Roman Empire, likely to be the bodies of warriors in a battle involving Germanic tribes.

On Wednesday, 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 ever in that region.