Gladiators battled lions and other wild animals in the arenas of the Roman Empire. But for all the tales of combat depicted in ancient texts, marble reliefs and mosaics, and then retold in movies and other modern media, archaeologists have never found direct physical evidence, such as skeletons of gladiators bearing animal-induced wounds.
At last, proof of classical combat between man and beast has been found in the form of a skeleton from a Roman settlement in Britain. The skeleton was discovered 20 years ago, in an excavation spurred by a couple hoping to renovate the yard of their home in the English city of York. An initial survey turned up evidence of an ancient cemetery, halting the construction plans.
“Britain is rich with Roman archaeology,” said Tim Thompson, an anthropologist at Maynooth University in Ireland and an author of a paper that describes the discovery in the journal PLOS One. “You pretty much can’t shove a spade in the ground without hitting something ancient and archaeological.”
The larger site contained the buried remains of more than 80 individuals, and many of their bodies showed signs of trauma. The demographics of the deceased, the types of injuries in their bones and the manner in which they were interred suggested that they had fought as gladiators about 1,800 years ago, when what is now York was an outpost of the Roman Empire.
One skeleton in particular, identified by researchers as 6DT19, had unusual wounds: small indentations in the hip bones.
Other researchers had noted that these notches looked like bite marks from a large animal, perhaps a lion.
To determine if the indentations of 6DT19’s hip really were bite marks, Thompson and his colleagues first had to collect data on what the bite marks of large mammals look like. For that, they made a somewhat unusual request of several British zoos: a chance to examine their lions’ leftovers.
By shining a grid of light on the bones gnawed on by zoo animals, the researchers created a map of the dimensions and depth of the animals’ bites. They then created a map of 6DT19’s hip bones and compared the bite marks left by the different animals with the indentations on the skeleton. Sure enough, the Roman combatant’s injuries were best explained by a lion’s bite.
However, the hip bite probably isn’t what killed 6DT19. “We think the individual was incapacitated in some way, and then the animal came along, bit and dragged the body away,” Thompson said. — KATE GOLEMBIEWSKI /NYT
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