Where the Romans Fought (interactive map)

I find it always interesting that the Romans never reached modern Czechia or slovakia, even though they invaded Britain or went so far in the middle east.

Man, I was about to go on a proper rant and claim that the site didn’t have every battle because it’s missing the battle of Maiden Castle…

I claim no great historical authority here but, since I grew up mostly within sight of the hillfort, we were taught about its history at school to an extent that, at the time, felt unrelenting, cruelly repetitive, and utterly tedious. In reality though, it probably lasted for a single term at the fag end of 1985 when we learned about the Celts[0].

But what we learned was that General Vespasian captured Maiden Castle after a brutal one day battle in AD 43 in which Maiden Castle’s Celtic defenders were slaughtered in what amounted to a one-sided rout due to the superior weapons, tactics, and discipline of the Romans. This is what I remembered, but I wanted to look it up to ensure my facts were straight.

Welp… TIL because subsequent investigation and analysis has shown that it didn’t happen at all so, no, dear reader, my “facts” were not straight.

There never was any big battle.

There might have been the odd smaller skirmish during the Roman period, but the bodies we found that were all supposed to have died in the big battle actually span several generations, dying at different times over a period of a couple of hundred years, and the evidence of violence in their deaths was in the vast majority of cases inter-tribal and occurred before the Romans even showed up.

Maiden Castle had already fallen into decline by the time the Romans arrived and was mostly abandoned for a long period until a temple (that you can still visit the ruins of) was built early in the 4th century.

So the reason the battle of Maiden Castle doesn’t appear on the site isn’t because the site is carelessly built AI-slop but because no such battle ever happened.

I have been… disillusioned. Hats off to the human behind the AI that built the site.

[0] I remember this with such precision because it was the first period of history we learned about at middle school, and matters didn’t improve significantly, because next it was the domestic matters of the bleeding Victorians, and lots of episodes of “How we used to live”.

Shitty ai website with impossible navigation, on iOS mobile at least.

When you present data to real life human beings you need to make your visualizations clearer. The map is OK, but literally everything else is nonsensical to me. Please take this as constructive feedback, because you can make something very cool with this data.

"Roman" should be defined.

"1480"is like calling the Iraq war a British Empire endeavour imo.

I would honestly like to see this as an animation, where the battles were fought over time. Maybe the site can do this but if so it’s not obvious.

The Dacians were not from Slavs, nor Balkans

how were the Romans involved with the battle of blue waters?

*that we know of

Pretty cool

I assume it was heavily AI generated. Still very cool data and vizualization

Slop.

Slop

The map is good but you need to spend some time getting rid of all the crap that claude added around it. Make the map the focus, spend some effort thinking about how you want to present additional information, figure out how to tell a better story. People are saying "slop" because it looks like every other AI website out there right now.