Via Wes
Bouncing along a dusty Bavarian logging road, archaeologist
Claus-Michael Hüssen keeps his eyes on the tree line to the left,
searching for some familiar landmark in the thick forest. Suddenly he
pulls the van over and gets out, pausing to pack tobacco into his pipe
and consult a 1:50,000-scale survey map.
Head down, pipe in hand, Hüssen—a researcher with the German
Archaeological Institute—crosses the road and wades through the thick
underbrush. Fifty yards from the road, he nearly misses a low dirt mound
about three feet high and six feet across. Littered with flat white
stones, it runs in an unnaturally straight line along the forest floor.
Nearly 2,000 years ago this was the line that divided the Roman
Empire from the rest of the world.
Here in Germany the low mound is all
that’s left of a wall that once stood some ten feet tall, running
hundreds of miles under the wary eyes of Roman soldiers in watchtowers.
It would have been a shocking sight in the desolate wilderness,
630 miles north of Rome itself. “The wall here was plastered and
painted,” Hüssen says. “Everything was square and precise. The Romans
had a definite idea of how things should be.” Engineering students
measuring another stretch of wall found one 31-mile section that curved
just 36 inches.
