UK SA/VS professor discovers Spartacus’ 1st battlefield in southern Italy

University of Kentucky archaeologist Paolo Visonà, Ph.D., an adjunct associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s School of Art and Visual Studies (SA/VS), announced a major archaeological discovery in Calabria, Italy.

Visonà and his team discovered Spartacus’ first battlefield in southern Italy and Roman fortification systems built by Crassus to blockade Spartacus’ army.

Through fieldwalking and geophysical and remote sensing techniques, Visonà’s team followed the Roman lines for more than 1.6 miles in a dense forest and collected numerous fragments of broken weapons. Visonà has conclusively identified some of the weapon fragments as originating in the first century B.C. Visonà’s team also found a complete bronze stud inside the wall at a depth consistent with Roman military equipment. The team remains in Calabria through the end of this month.

“The identification of Crassus’ defensive system happened partly by chance,” Visonà said. “After I gave a presentation in a small Calabrian town on May 11, two people who belonged to an Italian environmental organization showed me photos of the wall on their cellphones. They had no idea what it was, but they said that it was at least 100 meters (about 328 feet) long. When I saw the photos, I immediately realized their potential.”

The next week, the two environmentalists took Visonà to the site.

“The rest is history,” Visonà said. “After seeing the wall and ditch, it was easy to connect it to the description of Crassus’ fortification found in Plutarch and Appian (two Greek historians who lived nearly two centuries after Spartacus’ war against Rome). It checked out.

“By using hard science, we proved beyond reasonable doubt that this is most likely the real McCoy,” Visonà said. “Multiple finds of broken weapons, some of which I have already conclusively identified as being datable to the (first century B.C.) on the basis of comparisons with Roman battlefields in Slovenia, corroborate our conclusion.”

Visonà is a classical archaeologist who has been the principal investigator on several long-term excavation projects in Italy. His publications include students in archaeology, art history and numismatics. In 2017, he served as a Fulbright Specialist at Croatia’s University of Rijeka and University of Zadar. Visonà began doing fieldwork in Calabria in 1987. He has been looking for Spartacus’ tracks in the mountains of south-central Calabria for more than 30 years.

“It takes decades to know the interior of that region,” Visonà said. “The terrain is like that of the American southwest, and a lifetime is not enough to get to know it.

“More precise data will become available over the next few days and months,” he added. “A German museum is helping with the study of the weapons, which are being restored by the Italian Archaeological Service. A report about this find will be delivered at the annual meeting of the AIA in Philadelphia in Jan. 2-5, 2025, at which an Italian official will be present.”

Visonà had assistance from UK colleague George Crothers, Ph.D., an associate professor in UK’s Department of Anthropology, who directed the geophysical survey while Visonà was the principal investigator. Crothers was one of four researchers working under Visonà  and in collaboration with the Archaeological Superintendency of Calabria.

“It is a quiet place today, except for an occasional cuckoo bird,” Crothers said, describing the discovery site, “but it is easy to imagine Spartacus's army of slaves clashing with Roman legionaries in their desperate attempt to break through the Roman lines. Now that the site has been identified, I hope there is further study and provisions put in place to ensure its preservation and interpretation for the public.”

Dominik Maschek, director of the Department of Roman Archaeology of the Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Archaeologie in Mainz, Germany, will collaborate in the study of the finds. The Department of Earth Sciences of the Universita degli Studi dell'Insubria in Como, Italy, is examining a sample of the soil in which a concentration of broken weapons was found.

Funding was provided by The Foundation for Calabrian Archaeology, a Colorado- and Kentucky-based nonprofit organization.