Republication from livescience

Roman military sites in northwestern Iberia. Image credit: Blanco et al., doi: 10.3390/geosciences10120485.

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By Patrick Pester – Staff Writer

A vast network of dozens of Roman Army camps have been discovered in a mountainous region of northern Spain.

The camps show just how big the Roman military was around 2,000 years ago during the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.

“They reveal the intense Roman activity at the entrance to the Cantabrian Mountains during the last phase of the Roman conquest of Hispania,” study co-author João Fonte, a landscape archaeologist at the University of Exeter in England, said in a statement.

The remnants of the 66 camps, made for training and shelter, were discovered using remote-sensing technology. They range from small forts of a few thousand square feet to large fortified enclosures of 37 acres (15 hectares) and help explain how the Romans were successful in their 200-year battle to conquer the Iberian Peninsula from the native people.

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