This is the story of a treasure. Tons and tons of silver hidden underground in the Bad Ems area near Koblenz in central Germany. The Romans spent years looking for this mineral. It was his particular El Dorado. And, as happened to the Spanish in America, the legions were also unsuccessful in their mission.
Roman troops established two military camps in the area during the 1st century AD, of which only a few pieces of wood have now been found. Archaeologists from the Goethe University have spent years studying the place and the latest excavations have allowed them to find a whole defensive construction that consisted of sharp stakes, designed to prevent the enemy from approaching.
The martial-looking structure was meant to deter Germanic tribes from attacking the camp. Such installations, comparable in function to modern barbed wire, are already mentioned in the literature of the time. César, for example, wrote about them. But to date none had been found.
The moist soil of the Blöskopf area, the German researchers explain, provided ideal conditions for their preservation: the wooden spikes, which probably stretched the length of an entire ditch around the camp, were found to be well preserved.
The latest work at this site on both sides of the Emsbach valley began in 2016, when a hunter noticed a difference in color in the grain fields, which is usually an indication of underground structures.
A photo taken by a drone from the air confirmed the hypothesis. The field was crossed by a track that archaeologists thought might have originated with a huge tractor. But, in reality, it was a double moat that framed a Roman camp.
Geomagnetic analyzes later revealed a military fort occupying up to eight hectares and containing some 40 wooden towers. Subsequent work revealed that the camp, which was apparently intended to be a lasting construction, was never completed.
Hardly a permanent building was found, consisting of a warehouse and a depot. The 3,000 soldiers estimated to have been stationed at the fort probably had to sleep in tents. And some scorch marks show that the place burned down a few years after it was raised.
A team of students, led by archaeologist Frederic Auth, identified the second, much smaller camp, located about two kilometers away as the crow flies, on the other side of the Emsbach valley. But what about the money? What happened to it?
Next to the spectacular wooden defensive structure, a coin minted in the year 43 AD was discovered. So the experts turned to the written sources and found a relevant clue in the texts of the historian Tacitus: under the mandate of the Roman governor Curtius Rufus, in the year 47 AD. attempts to extract silver in the area failed.
Performance up to that point had simply been too poor. That is why the Romans abandoned the entire system of shafts and tunnels that they had built. But, a few meters below one of those galleries, there was a vein that would have allowed the Romans to extract silver for 200 years.
Ultimately, the mineral was mined in later centuries. The Romans' hope of having a lucrative precious metals mining operation also explains the presence of the military camp: they wanted to be able to defend themselves against sudden raids, which is not an unlikely scenario given the value of the raw material.
But the legionnaires ordered to dig the tunnels weren't too enthusiastic about the hard work. Tacitus says that they wrote to the Emperor Claudius in Rome, asking him to award the triumphal insignia to commanders in advance so they would not have to force their soldiers to slave labor unnecessarily. What they did not know was that up to 200 tons of silver were stored under their feet, waiting for someone to find and extract it.
