Dr. Francis McIntosh

So we think they're a local deity that the soldiers have realised they have to keep happy.

Yeah, so we don't know, you know, what the Hueta is, the Veta is, variants of what they did, but they were important.

Obviously, Mars is fairly common.

But then there's also lots of other...

very specific local ones like Coventina.

And then there's ones that they bring with them.

So Mithras is an Eastern god from Turkey.

His worship is spread through the soldiers and the army, and he's pretty popular up on the wall.

And then we've got a really unusual god called Mars Thingskus at Halstead.

So Mars, god of war, Thingskus.

So it's a hybridisation or syncretism of two cultures, but it's not of a local deity.

It's not of a deity from around Halsteads.

The current thinking is that it's actually a German god.

Yeah, which means like sort of all, you know, because that's thing and, you know, and

They've been merged together because we've got troops from what we would call Germany now, Germania, what the Romans would call.

And they've brought... Along the Rhine area, we think.

Yes, yeah.

And they've merged with Mars because they're both sort of warrior gods.

But we don't really understand quite who Mars Finskas is and what they thought he was doing for them.

We've also got the Alisaegi and there again, a deity from Germania that's been brought over.