[Teaser] Were Giant Pit Traps Used?

Here's a teaser of the script for the upcoming Deadly Moments video, Were Giant Pit Traps Used?

Introduction

It's often the highlight of a Hollywood battle when one side deploys a clever trap to turn the tide of battle. This might be a hidden pit or spikes, but will generally involve some flashy pyrotechnics; be it the flaming balls in Centurion, the flaming logs in Spartacus, or the flaming fields in King Arthur. While certainly cinematic and theoretically quite effective, did this sort of thing really exist? Today let’s explore the surprising history of ancient battlefield traps!

Booby Traps for Permanent Positions

At first glance these Hollywood ideas don’t seem too fantastical. Afterall they are fairly straightforward to build in terms of manpower, resources, and technical knowledge. So in theory I would argue that most competent armies of antiquity could certainly build such battlefield traps if they wished. The next question then becomes, did they ever want to? Well this would ultimately depend on the situation. Sinking resources into such traps comes at a cost and you are banking pretty heavily on the fact that your opponents will be forced in some way to pass through them rather than go around them.

Naturally the best situation for investing in traps will be in the defense of static, permanent positions such as cities and fortresses. You typically have months, years, and even decades to work on fortifications with an enemy which will be forced to attack from a limited direction. In this regard, the ancient world was filled with well defended locations bristling with anti-siege features. Oftentimes this came in the form of walls protected by trenches and backed by towers. Artillery could rain death from above while heavy material like stone and rubble might also be thrown down upon attackers. More complex devices might also appear like the inventive machines of Archimedes during the Roman siege of Syracuse or the apparent use of toxic chemicals in the sapper tunnels beneath Dura Europos. But this isn’t much of a revelation and I wouldn’t really categorize many of these as the sorts of battlefield traps we are looking to investigate.

Booby Traps for Semi-Permanent Positions

So let’s search beyond records of defenses for permanent positions. The next half-step will be to look at the defenses of semi-permanent positions. We see this typically occur when armies in the field had to bunker down for one reason or another. For instance the Roman legions were famous for doing this regularly by fortifying their nightly marching camps. We know that other armies made similar efforts to safeguard their camps and Tacitus even mentions that the barbarian Chatti began to entrench themselves at night after having become accustomed to the Roman methods of war. Other instances of field construction might occur when two armies faced off against one another but did not immediately fall into battle. This famously happened between Caesar and Pompey at the battle of Dyrrhachium where both sides furiously set about building fortifications to compromise the other’s position. In these various cases we see features reminiscent of the defenses we previously described for sieges.

However for these semi-permanent positions there was often less time to prepare and thus works were typically on a relatively smaller scale. But these limitations are perhaps what gave rise to more innovations. Taking the Romans as an example they seem to have created the ancient equivalent of a minefield. The basic idea of these lilia was to dig a series of conical holes with spikes at the bottom. These might be obfuscated by a layer of hay or shallow water. Opponents could certainly avoid them but doing so would drastically slow their advance and leave them prey to ranged attacks. They were famously used by Caesar’s troops in his encirclement of Alesia and would have helped in the fight to repel counterattacks by a far more numerous Gallic host. Archaeologists studying the remains of other Roman fortified positions, such as the castles of the Antonine wall, have found the remains of these lilia as well, indicating that their construction was quite standard practice.

In fact such booby traps were so simple that they appeared across much of the ancient world from the “tiger-pits” of the “east” to the “wolf-holes” of the west. More recently, the British Indian Army reported encountering spike traps during their conflicts in Burma in the 1870s while the American Army dealt with punji-stick traps during the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 70s. Oftentimes these booby traps were found not in front of defensive positions but along the likely routes for troop movement. In antiquity the same sort of thing may have occurred. For instance there were many cases where armies used scorched earth tactics to delay the advance of invaders which are noted to have included things like poisoned wells. Specific mentions of booby traps however are hard to come by. Yet there are some legendary accounts worth presenting.

My favorite example comes from the Mithridatic Wars. On one occasion it was said that in 65 BC the tribes of Colchis laid out toxic honey combs along the route of Pompey’s army. As the Roman troops foraged they discovered the sweet delights, ate them, and soon fell violently ill. An ensuing attack by the tribesmen wiped out 1,000 legionnaires. A similar incident is reported by Xenophon who passed through the same region. He states:

“The effect upon the soldiers who tasted the combs was that they all went quite off their heads, and suffered from vomiting and diarrhea, with a total inability to stand steady on their legs. A small dose produced a condition not unlike violent drunkenness, a large one an attack very like a fit of madness, and some dropped down, apparently at death's door. So they lay, hundreds of them, as if there had been a great defeat, a prey to the cruelest despondency. But the next day, none had died; and almost at the same hour of the day at which they had eaten they recovered their senses, and on the third or fourth day got on their legs again like convalescents after a severe course of medical treatment."

This so-called Mad honey was likely produced by bees that had ingested the nectar of Rhododendron ponticum which is known to have toxic properties. So it is possible that the legend has some veracity. Other ploys from antiquity which were reported to delay advancing armies include the felling of trees, the flooding of fields, and even the scattering of treasures to distract greedy troops.