Interesting. I’d like to see whats buried in the Teutoberg Forest. Must be some great stuff there just waiting to be found.
The search for the actual site of the culminating battle by that name finally bore fruit about twenty years ago (less than 20 perhaps), and there wasn’t too much. The Romans went right back out in the woods, recovered the dead as could be found, gave them whatever rites they used, and probably cremated the remains. The turncoat Arminius (called Herman by the Germans, who probably aren’t related to him anyway) who’d engineered the Varian Disaster was hunted down, and though he eventually saw his remaining forces defeated and ran for it, escaping Roman justice per se, members of his own family killed him a few years later. Who knows, perhaps the Romans paid someone off to make the hit.
And despite the apparently growing popularity of the misconception, the battle didn’t “stop Rome”; the Romans recovered their previously conquered territory, and expanded it, and had frontier peace through a complicated system of bribery (evidently they bought the German tribes pretty cheaply too), along with pretty nice trade (peace comes from commerce). Along with a series of walls which stretched from river to river in the area north of the Alps, and the bribery/trade combo, and the stick (being the occasionally exercised threat of Roman force), the Romans controlled the entire frontier from the North Sea to the Black Sea using just nine legions (on a good day, that’s 45,000 men; and sometimes it was seven or fewer legions), along with two naval bases (one on each end).