Can 3D scanning of countermarks on Roman coins help to reconstruct the movement of Varus and his legions

Publius Quinctilius Varus has become widely known as commander-in-chief of the three Roman legions that were annihilated in the battle of the Teutoburg forest in 9 CE by a federation of Germanic tribes. Coins bearing his countermark VAR are common on Roman sites in the Rhineland and are generally accepted to mark coins distributed as donations to the troops during his time as legatus Augusti pro praetore from 7 to 9 CE. In this study, 37 coins with these countermarks have been recorded from different archaeological sites using high-resolution 3D-scanning. Having substantiated prior ascriptions of these countermarks to individual countermark dies by procrustes analysis, a combination of metric statistics and use-wear analysis was applied to attribute ten countermarks to different wear-stages within the life-cycle of the same specific die. While coins with countermarks produced by the die during early phases of attrition are confined to the upper Rhineland and Mosel area, later phases have been found in the lower Rhineland at Asciburgium and on the battlefield of Kalkriese. Coins that bear countermarks of an already heavily worn and irreversibly damaged die are found in Nijmegen, Mainz and Wiesbaden. We discuss if these different groups of coins were emitted together at one site and may be related to a demobilisation after a joint operation.