The Roman Fort At Banna

This is the main site at Birdoswald. In the foreground are the actual ruins, while an old farmhouse stands to the far right. During Roman times, this was called Camboglanna or Banna, and it was manned from the late 2nd century onward by a unit of 1,000 Dacian infantrymen and their descendants. The Dacian people were a warrior tribe with an empire that once extended across Romania, Moldova, and parts of Slovakia and the Ukraine. They were ethnically similar to the Thracians, who lived to their south in what is now Bulgaria. Both the Dacians and the Thracians are also related to the Phrygians, Indo-European speakers who colonized Asia Minor and later gave rise to the people of Armenia. A unit of Thracians was stationed at Banna as well, but only briefly - apparently to help with the initial construction of the fort. Any "Border Reivers" whose Y-DNA haplotypes match those of the people of Southeastern Europe and Anatolia might conceivably be descended from the warriors of Banna.