The Cannae Battlefield (216 BC), a pivotal engagement during the Second Punic War, led to the destruction of one of the largest consular armies ever raised by the Republic. Historians have for centuries paid the utmost attention to unitby- unit dispositions and tactical maneuvers without studying the local geology and particularly the geomorphology of the battle site. A brief traverse over the battle site, adjacent to the museum in 2004, led to a hidden defile, heretofore not mentioned in the literature, one which may have helped turn the tide for the Carthaginians, and offering prospect of further geoarchaeological investigation.

Stacks of the Pleistocene tills and associated airfall/slopewash/colluvial sediment abound on East African Mountains but few localities exist where thick deposits of middle to Late Pleistocene age can be studied to bedrock with topography the main soil-forming agent over <0.8 Ma. Two tills form the main structure of the catena, the oldest buried in the crest, backslope and footslope of the deposit, the youngest forming the crest and upper backslope, with massive colluvial infill forming a still younger sediment mass superposed on older sediment in the lower backslope, footslope and toeslope, the latter all radiocarbon dated to within the last glaciation (Liki on Mt. Kenya; Weichselian in Europe, Wisconsin in North America). The moraine stack, first identified by J.W. Gregory in the late 19th century, as belonging to the ‘Older Glaciation’ (Illinoian in North America; Teleki on Mt. Kenya), is much older than originally thought with tills and other paraglacial sediment extending to saprolitic bedrock, paleomagnetic assessment and relative weathering indices placing the mass in the Brunhes Chron. These results demonstrate that despite erosion and weathering, paleosols in toposequences near the margins of successive glaciations retain properties allowing reconstruction of environmental changes over long periods of time.