RAINER-BUCH AND THE 27-YEAR ERROR

            Friedrich and the staff at Höhenheim have uncovered an error in one of Becker’s earlier chronologies that is of great importance concerning the last known construction date of the limes around Rainer-Buch.  There was a large archaeological find in a Roman well along the limes.  It seems that someone sunk a net of valuables into a well on the Roman fortifications, presumably during an attack.  The evidence suggests that the Romans, just before an attack threw their valuables together and sunk them in their well.  This would keep them safe until the attacks were over, only this time no one was able to retrieve them, and they lay at the bottom of the well for almost 2000 years (Friedrich and Greiner, 2001) .

            The well had wooden walls and contained several burnt pieces of wood debris that rested on top of the net of valuables, concealing them for ages.  Bernd Becker was commissioned to use dendrochronology to ascertain the age of the well (Well #13), believed to be one of the last pieces of evidence of an attack along the limes (Friedrich and Greiner, 2001) .  The wooden walls were all dated and helped to fill the infamous Roman Era gap that has existed in the German chronology (Figure 2.17).  The wooden debris was harder to identify, but the GLK percentage was decent and they concluded that the oldest piece of wood at this site was a burnt piece of wood that rested upon the net of valuables (Becker, 1981) .  This piece of wood was fashioned much like a rain gutter and was concluded to be the last known construction on the limes.  The latest date of this tree was AD 260 (Becker, 1981) .

            The problem with this sample was, even though it had a GLK value of 63%, it had to be crossdated to Hollstein’s chronology in a period with only three other samples, which represented the lowest sample depth for the chronology (Hollstein, 1980) .  After Friedrich corrected Hollstein’s chronology in 2001, it came to his attention that the 27-year error he uncovered changed the chronology in the same area that the wooden sample from Rainer-Buch was dated.  After the sample from Rainer-Buch was removed from the chronology and a new GLK test was run on an updated chronology with a sample depth of around one hundred samples, the new GLK value of this segment in its original placement in the updated chronology was below 30% (Friedrich and Greiner, 2001) .  This new GLK value showed that it was crossdated incorrectly and was removed from this placement and found to belong earlier in the chronology (Friedrich and Greiner, 2001) . 

            Friedrich was able to show that this piece of debris wood (labeled “A” in Figure 2.17) was from the well wall, because it showed the exact same pattern as the wooden wall and was a board cut from the same tree.  He concluded that the debris was not thrown in, as was originally hypothesized based on the original misplacement, but fell in after being burnt in situ (Friedrich and Greiner, 2001) . 

    This new interpretation was able to point out the error of the older data, but more importantly, re-dated the last known construction date of the limes from AD 260 to AD 247 (Friedrich and Greiner, 2001) .  This new date of AD 247 supported the argument of the historian, Lucien Musset, that the most probable date of the first successful major attacks occurred in AD 254 based on historical documentation (Musset, 1975) .