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.