‘Behind the Blue’: UK professor discovers Spartacus’ 1st battlefield

KODY KISER: From the campus of the University of Kentucky, you're listening to Behind the Blue. I'm Kody Kiser with UK Strategic Communications.

Last summer, University of Kentucky archaeologist Paolo Visona, an adjunct associate professor in the University of Kentucky's School of Art and Visual Studies, announced a major archaeological discovery in Calabria, Italy.
Visona and his team discovered Spartacus's first battlefield in Southern Italy and Roman fortification systems built by Crassus to blockade Spartacus's army.

Through fieldwalking and geophysical and remote sensing techniques, Visona's team followed the Roman lines for more than 1.6 miles in a dense forest, and collected numerous fragments of broken weapons. Visona has conclusively identified some of the weapon fragments as originating in the first century BC. Visona's team also found a complete bronze stud inside the wall at a depth consistent with Roman military equipment. On this episode of Behind the Blue, my colleague Tom Musgrave talks with Visona about the path to his discovery and what it means for the field of archaeology's and the University of Kentucky.

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TOM MUSGRAVE: Welcome, Dr. Paolo Visona, to chat with us about your archaeological discovery this past summer in Southern Italy. First off, I want to ask you briefly, tell us who Spartacus was and why his story is important in the context of this archaeological discovery.

PAOLO VISONA: Well, thank you, first of all, for having me here today. It's a great pleasure to revisit this find so many months later, and after so much thinking about our-- you put it, discovery, which to some extent it really was.

Spartacus was fundamentally a gladiator. He was a gladiator originating from what is today's Bulgaria. And at some point, he was shipped to what is now South Central Italy. And he was undergoing training as a gladiator when he joined a rebellion with a number of his fellow gladiators in training. There are almost 40 ancient literary sources on Spartacus, but out of these nearly 40 sources, two stand out for giving more detail about his origins and his career and his exploits.

What did he do? Well, first of all, he managed to escape. Then he quickly became the leader of this band of escaped gladiators or trainees. This happened not far from Mount Vesuvius, in the region of Campania, which is roughly, I would say, 100 miles south of Rome.

At this point, the gladiators had to worry about where to go. So they managed to seize some weapons. The Romans organized a chase. The gladiators years managed to break out of this siege, since the Romans had surrounded Mount Vesuvius with troops. And then the story really begins. He has to go somewhere, and obviously he wants to be free.

So to answer very quickly the question, Spartacus is a man who wanted to be free from his condition. Depending on whom you believe about or from, or among the ancient sources and the myriad modern interpretations, Spartacus could be a freedom fighter. He could be a champion for universal freedom, and so on. From my standpoint-- and I have had to learn about and about Spartacus because of the finds from last year-- from my standpoint, Spartacus is a man who became a leader who had obvious leadership skills. He had some training, whether or not he was serving in some capacity for the Roman army before he became a prisoner and a slave, and then a gladiator in training.

But Spartacus was a successful former gladiator who became a leader of fellow slaves, and who was trying to take them somewhere so they could be free. I'm not saying that necessarily he was trying to fight against the Roman system. There was no Roman Empire at the time, in the sense of a comprehensive political system with provinces and governors all appointed by the emperor, because there was no emperor yet. This happened roughly 73 years before the birth of Christ, and roughly 60 years before the establishment of the Roman Empire as we know it under Augustus.

Spartacus was trying to lead these, his followers, to some place where they could be free. He was not trying to abolish slavery. In that sense, he cannot be compared to other historical figures who may have tried to-- yes, to abolish slavery or to eliminate slavery, to be more precise, in one way or another, by peaceful or by violent means. He wanted essentially to be free, to follow his destiny with his own followers. And that's where it gets complicated.

By doing so, of course, he had to defend himself against the Roman army. And the Roman army was not a single entity, because the Romans had several armies at their disposal. When this happened, when he escaped from captivity as a gladiator, the Romans, which were then under a republican system of government, were embroiled in several conflicts across the Mediterranean. So they had armies in Spain. They had armies in what is now Turkey. They had armies in Greece, in the Balkan region. They had armies, probably, or armed forces in North Africa, and so on, which meant that the Romans had to scramble to put together an army to confront Spartacus, because Spartacus had to feed his followers and had to escape from the clutches of the Roman system of slavery, which meant try to go somewhere where he could be free.

And he was like a pinball bouncing around the Italian Peninsula for something like a couple of years. He tried to go South. He tried to go North. He tried to go East. He tried to even escape by sea. And this is where our story, at least as far as I'm concerned, begins in Southern Italy, because we happen to find evidence of Spartacus's presence, referring to the time when after he had just tried to escape to Sicily but was unable to for various reasons, and therefore was retracing his steps, going from the Sicilian straits up the Italian Peninsula, which is when, of course, the Romans caught up with him under the leadership of Crassus and tried to blockade him in essentially the toe of Italy.

So I hope I've answered the question. There's much that we don't know about Spartacus, even though rivers of ink have been written about him. You can trust the ancient sources up to a point. And there's only two of them, by the way, who give more details about his career, and they are Plutarch and Appian. And these are historians who wrote a century and a half or longer after the events.

And they tell a different story, although they agree about the basic facts, meaning that he was of Thracian origins, i.e. originating possibly from what is today's Bulgaria, that he was a former gladiator, that he confronted successfully the Romans and kept them at bay for something like two years, but then that eventually he was cornered, defeated in the field, and his followers were crushed and the rebellion ended.

The big impression that he left throughout antiquity, for the next 500 years of Roman history, was that it was a major threat to the Roman system. He was vilified and held up as one of the greatest dangers to the survival of Roman civilization as the Romans knew it.

So as recently as 400 years, 500 years after his death, there were still writers that remember him because of the threat that he was to the Roman order. He was like another Hannibal to some extent. He came this close to defeating the Romans and therefore to destroying what the Romans had achieved up to that point.

TOM MUSGRAVE: He was a disrupter, essentially.

PAOLO VISONA: Yes. There would have been no Roman Empire, perhaps, if he had won. The consequence of his ultimate victory would have been unthinkable in many ways. I'm not saying that he would have abolished slavery, because once again, this was not his goal. And people need to know this, or at least listener need to know this.

His "crusade," quote unquote, was not against slavery. It was, first of all, trying to be free. But in that sense, he represents all of us because we definitely hold up our freedom as the most important thing that we have in life. Without freedom, nothing else is possible. Happiness is not possible without freedom. The pursuit of happiness, as we define it in our own political system, is not possible without freedom. In that sense, he is a champion of freedom, or he became a champion of freedom, but not at that time.

At that time, his freedom was-- freedom was for himself and his followers so that they could get away, find some kind of a safe haven, maybe returning to their original countries, if possible. He tried that to some extent, because he did. He was trying to go over the Alps and some of his followers were Celts, or came from his own country of origin. So if he had managed to do that, they would have then dispersed, some going into what is today's France and some going towards what is now maybe the Balkan Peninsula, Greece, Turkey and so on.

That did not happen, but that's what he wanted. He wanted to get away and be free, first of all. But he had to fight in order to do so, because he also caused problems. You call him a "disrupter." Yes, he was, because he had to feed his followers off the land, and that meant taking whatever was available. And that was not nice or easy because according to at least some accounts from the ancient sources, he was also pillaging, burning, raping, looting, and so on, or he was accused of having done that-- not personally, necessarily. In fact, he was never held responsible for rapes or things like that.

Part of his charisma was that he was-- according to, again, the main ancient sources, that he was a reasonable person, that he was definitely strong, that he was definitely brave, that he was definitely a leader. But he had a lot of people to control, some of whom, of course, felt free to indulge their own desires or drives, because it was a motley crew under his under his leadership and he could not--

TOM MUSGRAVE: Other gladiators, correct?

PAOLO VISONA: Well, not only gladiators, all kinds of other former slaves that followed him. And so you can imagine how difficult it would have been to control a horde of former slaves from many different backgrounds, some local Italians, some coming from different countries across the Mediterranean, countries modern, different regions, areas around the Mediterranean who were given the opportunity to follow him after they abandoned or killed their owners, and then they have to live by killing other landowners, or at least robbing them of anything that they had so they could survive. It was not easy.

So it was a complicated story in that sense, because he was not necessarily a liberator, although, of course, those who wanted to follow him were slaves, not really landowners or people who had estates and villas and property, and so on, because he came to take that from them.

If he had to feed his followers and you were a farmer or someone that owned, let's say, a vast estate with crops and animals and so on, he would take all that in order to feed his own people and to equip himself with anything that he needed, horses, weapons, tools, even basic raw materials that could be turned into weapons, and so on.
And so he was not a friendly person. He was obviously an object of conflict and a most wanted person in many ways. And so he had to fight. He had to fight against many odds that were against him.

TOM MUSGRAVE: That narrative leads nicely into as we fast forward to the events of the summer of 2024.

PAOLO VISONA: Right.

TOM MUSGRAVE: I'd like for you to talk now about the discovery of the site of Spartacus's first battle against Crassus and talk, also, about the team that you had with you, if you would.

PAOLO VISONA: OK. A slight correction. It was not the first battle against Crassus, but definitely had to do with Crassus. And we don't even know whether it was a battle that took place there, but definitely it was what I call-- what others have called a conflict landscape, a battlefield, for sure. We know that there was definitely action on that site.

Well, this happened, first of all, because of a tremendous amount of luck. And, I stopped many years ago advising students to get into archaeology, in part because I could not accept to convince people to make a career based, to a large extent, on luck.

Archaeology without luck does not work. And why? Because you may have all the brains, all the training in the world, all the money in the world. But if you are at the wrong place, you're not going to find anything at that spot. That may not be a site, right?

Archaeologists find sites, but in order to find sites, you need clues. You need means. You need talent. You need training. You need a team, but you also need luck.

And for example, last year, we were investigating two sites, one of which turned out to be a dry hole, pretty much. We had a permit to investigate those two sites, and we gave up on getting a permit to excavate the site that turned out to be a dry hole, so we didn't waste any money or any time. But the fact is that we were convinced that that site would pan out and be either a Greek farmstead or perhaps a Greek and Roman farm site, and so on.

And our investigations were completely fruitless. Even if we used geophysics, we could see underground to some extent, so we could detect the presence of buried structures. Well, we did not. We did the previous year, in 2023, and that was promising enough that this time we were really intending to pursue not just more geophysics, but also field actual excavation. It was impossible to obtain an insurance policy to let us operate in Southern Italy, and we just gave up after two months of trying to get insurance to operate it.

So we just gave up the idea of getting that permit. And instead, we were given the permit to continue more remote sensing, in other words, more investigations aimed at seeing what was underground. Well, they turned out fruitless, to be fruitless.

And when we used a metal detector to sweep the area, that too was fruitless. We did find some odds and ends. Yes, we did find an ancient coin. We did find bullets. We found pieces of lead. But we did not find a smoking gun. We did not find more objects that would be diagnostic, that would prove without a doubt that that was either a Greek or a Roman interesting farm site.

So luck, luck. Luck is essential. And is because of luck, to a large extent because of luck, that we managed to identify this site.
So it went as follows. We were in the area--

TOM MUSGRAVE: Southern Italy.

PAOLO VISONA: Southern Italy, the toe of the Italian Peninsula. So--

TOM MUSGRAVE: Calabria.

PAOLO VISONA: At the end of the boot. Yes, Calabria, a region that is largely mountainous, that has very few coastal strips, and a region where mountain archaeology has almost never been done. It's just beginning to be done. We have been doing mountain archaeology for something like 15 to 20 years prior to last year. And we knew our territory quite well because we had been running a very agile, small operation that allowed us to roam this territory and to conduct various kinds of investigations, from simple field walking to actual geophysics, to actual excavations not far from the area where we identified this site. So we were there.

And it so happened that at a conference at a nearby town, some local-- I call them environmentalists because these are people who belong to an organization that essentially tries to protect the environment, to either build or maintain mountain trails, signage, and so forth, so that people can enjoy the land without messing with it, leaving trash, destroying natural habitats, and so on.

So these people at this conference before I left showed me pictures about a mysterious wall. It was mysterious to them because of course, they had no idea what it was. And they showed me pictures, which I have on my phone, showing them posing next to this wall.
This immediately triggered my interest because even though at that time, I did not know as much as I know now about Spartacus and the ancient sources and everything there is to know, really, about them, because I spent the last seven months researching daily Spartacus and the period and battlefields of this time period, and so on.

Well, even though I did not know the details, I knew enough about Spartacus and Crassus because 40-some years ago, when I began doing fieldwork in this region of Italy, in the toe of the Italian Peninsula, there were already stories circulating about a Roman wall and a wall having to do with Spartacus. Why? Not because of legend, not because of century-old tradition that somewhere on these mountains-- no, because 40 some years ago, a local scholar wrote a major article in a Calabrian journal, therefore easily accessible to many people, in which he tried to identify the fortifications built by the Romans to blockade Spartacus in that area, in this general mountainous area, which corresponds to the spine of the Italian Peninsula, the watershed between the two coasts of Italy, the Eastern and the Western Coast. On this high plateau, a local scholar had placed the Roman fortifications, which, by the way, were pointed out to me something like a good 12 to 15 years ago.

By sheer luck once again, when I was based in a village doing some pottery work that I had to do routinely in order to eventually study and publish my finds, I was there getting the keys to my lodging from a local priest when somebody from the park service showed up and said, I have found something on the mountains that I want to show you. What is it? It's a stone triangle, the guy said.
OK, I immediately thought, stone triangle? It's got to be prehistoric. What else can be triangular and made of stone? In fact, it was a stone ax.

When he showed it to me the next day-- he lived nearby-- he also said, by the way, do you know anything about a Roman wall? I said, what Roman wall? I had already been there for a good 20-plus years. I never heard about a Roman wall on the mountains. He said, well, it's only half an hour away from here. I'll show you tomorrow. Fine.

So we drive to this place. He takes me into the woods, and we arrive at a wall in the middle of nowhere. Obviously, a section of the wall is actually part of a structure. This wall didn't impress me as being a Roman wall, for the simple reason that I quickly found mortar, like some kind of crude cement or plaster. Romans don't do that sort of thing, and the Greeks didn't, either, right? So I knew that was not ancient.

But inside that wall were fragments of Greek roof tiles. I said, oh, if there are Greek roof tiles incorporated into the wall, that means that there is a Greek structure here. And in fact, I looked around ad Greek roof tiles on the ground. Oh, God. So it began with that first visit. And this led us to field walking investigations in the area.

Eventually, we identified, located a Greek fort there, which we excavated.

The find of last year was only maybe two miles from the site that we excavated as a Greek fort. And again, two miles from this wall that turned out to be a modern wall, maybe built 300 years ago, maybe part of some kind of a police station or some kind of a custom house or guard post built by the authorities of the Kingdom of Naples inside that forest and that particular spot to control, possibly, let's say outlaws or other undesirables that were preying on a trail coming from the coast, crossing the mountains, dropping on the other side.

So those ruins had nothing to do with Spartacus, but the Calabrian scholar that I mentioned a while ago, 40 years ago, had written that those ruins were actually the walls built by Crassus to blockade Spartacus. So I did investigate them in some detail. I examined-- I had the mortar studied at a lab. It was pronounced anything but, but certainly not ancient. And I investigated the area enough to know that this would not work, could not possibly be a Roman fortification system.

So I was familiar with the literature, what I have read. And even though I did not know Plutarch or Appian, I knew that the fortifications had to include a wall and a ditch, and I also knew that these fortifications had to somehow blockade, let's say, this high plateau, this high ridge from east to west. They had to be placed in such a way that they would blockade this entire ridge, which itself runs from north to south. So they have to be at right angles to blockade the ridge.

The ridge top, by the way, had a road which since prehistory has been used as a natural avenue for people traveling north-south. So anybody who wanted to blockade the ridge had to blockade that road. And of course, that road, running north-south, had to be blockaded at right angles by some kind of barrier going east to west. So this was in the back of my mind.
When we eventually saw the ruins that had been shown to me in a photograph, I leapt to conclusions in my mind very, very quickly. First of all, these ruins were near the narrowest point on this ridge. They were near a critical pass, and they were oriented east to west, and there seemed to be a ditch near the wall, and the ditch was in the right position for someone coming from the south. In other words, the ditch was on the left side of this wall going east to west, where it was supposed to be, according to what the ancient sources--

TOM MUSGRAVE: Plutarch--

PAOLO VISONA:--Plutarch said.

Of course, that same day, I Googled Plutarch and read the story to convince myself once again that I was right. But it was intuition and then some basic analysis of the topography that led me to anticipate or to very quickly hypothesize that this could be it.
Because first of all, the wall looked old. It was covered with moss. It was wide enough. It was also incredibly long. And at first blush, it appeared to be like 200 yards long. But 200 yards is a heck of a long wall.

It also went up a slope like a hillside, which is kind of unusual, but it went in the right direction. It went towards the east, or I should say, from east to west. So many things checked out. And at this point, training takes over. If this is what you think it is, how can you prove your hypothesis? You can only prove it with science, and it has to be hard science.

Now, we could not excavate, so what else can we do? Well, we had all these other tools in our toolkit. We had a radar. We had a magnetometer. We could take core samples and we could use a metal detector.

So all these things combined led to the identification of the site. It was not just one, let's say, investigative technique. It was a sum total of this approach, this integrated approach, plus, of course, the finds themselves that led us to believe this has got to be the real thing. We have the real McCoy here.

TOM MUSGRAVE: Because you found artifacts at the site, as well.

PAOLO VISONA: Because of course, yes. And I also want to add, I found it with my own hands. This is not hearsay. I did not send people, I did not sic people on the land and say, take the metal detector and tell me what you found when you come back. No, I know exactly what I did because I was there, three times. I did three two-hour tours with the metal detector, during which I also had a GPS receiver so I could record the position of the finds where I found them.

And of course, I had bags. I had a handbook. I could take notes. Every object was bagged and tagged so that I knew when, where, and how I found it. I could make notes, because I had to dig it out myself.

Now, using the metal detector is a tricky thing, because you're doing damage. Because if you want to retrieve what the metal detector says, you have to dig it out. It's not just it beeps here, it must be something. No. We found objects that were obviously modern, modern trash. We have anything from World War I bullets to coins of 200 years old to cartridges from yesterday to just barbed wire, junk of this kind, some cans. I'm sure we had horseshoes. We had nails that didn't appear to be ancient.

But the fact is that we had 36 artifacts, and more than 1/3 of them were ancient. They look ancient. Now, you can say, how'd you know they were ancient? Well, because I've been at this, doing this for a long, long time.

So I still remember when I pulled out the hilt of either a dagger or a combat knife or a sword. I knew exactly what it was. I was pulling it out. I said, It's got to be it. When I pulled out a javelin point, I knew exactly what it was. It's not as if I had to think about it, what is it, a ton. There were very few things that gave me pause because of experience. So you understand that an uneducated person, an untrained person, cannot do these, do this easily because that person might be swayed or biased by all sorts of things.

For one thing, that person may not record the data properly, may just put everything in one bag and come home and say, I found all these things today. Yeah, but where does each item come from? Because the idea was always these items have to be recorded in relation to the wall and to the ditch. So my metal detector sweep were normally to the south of the wall because I expected that to be the ditch and to be-- I wasn't thinking in terms of battlefield at the moment, because I hadn't had any evidence of weaponry or military items of any kind. I was thinking more in terms of the fortifications and the fact that they worked together with ditch and wall.

Ditch by itself was not enough. The wall by itself was not enough. There had to be a ditch and a wall. So I guess to answer very quickly this important question, I reached these conclusions very, very early in my mind. They checked out. It was very exciting, but they had to be proven now by science. And the metal detector was one of the last things I did.

First, we had to do the hard science and this is when luckily I had a partner, Professor Crothers, who could do the hard science. He did stuff that I could not do. He used the radar, used the magnetometer. He had a methodology that he had been following. I've been working with him for the last, what, 15 years now. And we've been on various sites together. And he was always following a standard operating procedure, which is very time consuming, very methodical.

You cannot rush the way you do science. You cannot rush a doctor doing brain surgery. The doctor has to do whatever needs to be done. It's the same thing.

TOM MUSGRAVE: Rigorous inquiry, I imagine.

PAOLO VISONA: Yes, exactly. So he had to be rigorous. And unfortunately, this happened at some point, like at the beginning of our season, we had barely begun to do our own work when this landed on our lap. And we were convinced that it was important.
So it's also strange that it happened when it did, because we had not gone to Italy to do this sort of thing. We had all the tools we wanted. But we had to do, first of all, our mission, which was we had to finish work at these two sites. And again, we had to make time for this new site, while at the same time we were waiting for a farmer to decide whether or not he was going to bring cows that will eat the grass to allow us to do ground-penetrating radar at one site. At another site in the middle of the forest, we had other worries, and so on. But eventually, we made time for everything.

We also-- and this is important for the record-- we did not keep this to ourselves, maybe because we did not stop to think about the implications. Maybe because it was early in the discovery process. So once we thought that what we had was big and important and definitely connected with Spartacus and Crassus, we told the authorities. We told the Italian archaeological service, which meant basically taking the show on the road and going 100 kilometers to the regional capital by appointment and going to talk to our archaeological minders and say, look, we think we have found this and we can show you what we think we have found.

And at this point, it gets interesting because it's clear that they did not know that we have found this. It's clear that they were not certain for one second that this was the real McCoy. By the same token, they did not say no. And, they sort of paid us some rope so that we could continue to investigate this. You have our blessings to go back to the site, but you need a permit to do this thing.
This was not in our mission statement, as it were. It was not part of our research design for last year, for which we had a paperwork. So we had to be issued marching papers to be legit and work in this area. This took time.

At the same time, they were not really convinced that this was a potential find. It was sort of time went by and we were also pressed for time because we had only so many days to be in the field before people had to leave and go back home, because we had only budgeted for only so long.

To make a long story short, we started late because of airline problems Already we lost three days with the gear arriving late, with missed flights an so on. But by the time we got going, it was already mid-May, and we were supposed to be done by the 5th of June. So we had three weeks to go with our own work that took priority plus, this. But for this, we did not have the actual paperwork. So what we could do while we waited for the paperwork was to actually field walk the area. Nobody would say that oh, you cannot go there because no, this is not a war zone. This is not a classified area, a restricted area.

But it was. And they didn't tell us, they themselves did not know that this was, in fact, a restricted area. This was in what is called a Restricted Area A according to the National Park of the Aspromonte, which is the controlling authority that has jurisdiction over the land. It is a huge park that includes our area. These people should have issued us a permit, but they were not even contacted.

We were not told, hey, look, you cannot go there because the park has to issue you a permit. No, they did not know even that. This is like a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand does.

TOM MUSGRAVE: Yeah, it sounds like government bureaucracy at work.
 

PAOLO VISONA: Not only that, but there was a major hiking trail, a major hiking trail with recent signs right by the wall, right by the site. And obviously, there were tourists. There were hikers. We saw them coming down, going up, while we were there in the early days. So this was a restricted area, but there was a trail. It's a contradiction in terms.

So all this was new, completely new. The Italian authorities had no clue. And this is a fact which I could prove. And also, we ourselves did not have all the paperwork to do serious scientific investigations, other than field walking.

So what we could do was first of all, let's walk this thing, see how long it is, because it turns out that the wall was not just 200 yards long. It was almost two miles long, in the forest. And the forest was actually a-- I'm not saying a virgin old growth forest, but it was a national forest, in other words, surrounded by trees, mostly beech, some conifers, and so on. But first of all, we have to establish how long is it.

We did not know. Nobody knew. Here was the best part. Nobody knew. So we had this incredible privilege of being first on site. And so that's what we did until we got the paperwork.

So for several days, I would say at least three times-- I'm now quoting from memory. Although I was taking notes every day, whenever we came down the mountain, I will log my notes for the day, saying, we've done this, we've done that. But all that we could do was to say that it was yea long. And of course, we also had GPS receivers, state of the art GPS receivers.

With that, because it was one unit, we could track our wall and actually see it on the computer, on a laptop, see where the wall went by simply looking at the GPS track of our field walking, and by looking at all these positions that we took every so many yards, see how we went, what shape it had. And pretty soon, it looked like a bow- shaped.

It was not-- it was not a straight line. Another mystery. Why is it not a straight wall? Romans normally built straight walls. Well, it was not a straight wall.

The ditch seemed to be there, but it was also not obvious. I mean, it was obvious to our eye because well, first of all, we knew it must be there. But some times there was just a very shallow indentation in the ground next to the wall. And the wall itself turned from being a proper wall made of stone to essentially an earthwork, like an embankment, like a hump on the ground, that it was no more than a foot high at some points.

I did not know then, as I know now, that this is because of erosion, because I have confronted our wall with Roman walls from Germany, from Switzerland. And so I know that our wall is exactly the same as what you see at these other late Republican sites. But at the time, it was a mystery. Why is it changing? Why is it now-- it used to be made of stone, and now it is made of dirt. Why?

But we did find how long it was and where it ended. And it was interesting because one, twice, three times was not enough. You have to walk it 4, 5, 6 times to really own it and to really own it in your mind, because even right now, I could-- if I close my eyes, I know exactly where I am along the route of the wall because I walked it so many times, and I also got lost so many times coming back. so--

TOM MUSGRAVE: Even with GPS.

PAOLO VISONA: Even with GPS. Well, George is much better at using his GPS than I am. I use GPS simply to mark a location, not actually for what it is intended to be used, which is to get you out of a wilderness, get you back to your car if you're hunting somewhere. No, I never use it that way. I've only used it to actually mark a location on the Earth of an object or a feature, something like that. So thanks to George, we could definitely see our field walking, where he led, where it ended.

And then we had another major stroke of luck. We had a student from an Italian university, Siena, who was attached to us for a few days because we were actually going to work for him, for his professor, take our equipment, and do a survey of a site, something like almost 50, 60 miles to the southwest of our area, because of a favor that we were doing to this colleague from the University of Siena.
And his student was there to guide us to the site. But this student was extremely savvy. And when we started talking and I said, I wish we had LiDAR, he said, I can get you LiDAR. What? Yes, you could actually access free Italian LiDAR if you know how to do it. And he knew how to do it.

This kid was a genius. Even though he was maybe 20 years old, he knew. He was a techie. And in a matter of seconds, we had a LiDAR photograph of the forest and the area of the wall. And we could see the wall on the LiDAR, because the LiDAR had a 1 meter resolution, above ground, which means that the LiDAR could go through the forest canopy and get down actually a meter into the Earth and show us the exact the line and length of the wall from start to finish.

It was miraculous. Not only that, but it could load also county lines, boundary lines so we could see to whom the land belonged. And we quickly realized that oh, OK, so the wall belongs to this county. So the next day, I took the show on the road once again with George and his daughter. We went to talk to the mayor of the county in whose land the wall was.

Imagine the scene. It's a village in a sleepy mountain village of Calabria. It looks like Mexico. And I go there. I'd like to talk to the mayor. I'm so and so, University of Kentucky, he's Professor so and so, University of Kentucky. We have to show you something.

We think that you have Crassus-- what? First question, who's Crassus, and so on. And then it all begins. And then we want to see your maps. We want to see your cadastral records, please.

And the story begins. So the surveyor, the town surveyor brings out these old, old, old maps showing the boundary lines. So I start seeing where the wall is. Of course, there's no wall. It's just the area. And we can see the cadastral parcels, but something that nobody else has seen, but I did see, is also the ancient name of a stream to the south of the wall.

And this name is just mind boggling, because the name of that stream means "stream of a slave on a pole," or "stream of the impaled slave." OK, now we know that there's some bad stuff happened between Crassus and Spartacus. We know that at least one--

TOM MUSGRAVE: Ghoulishly specific.

PAOLO VISONA: One Roman was crucified by Spartacus right in front of the Roman lines. But to find this as a place name in the records of a sleepy Calabrian town was kind of odd, unusual. So I kept that under wraps for a long, long time, and I started investigating.

I mean, the story can end even today, because today, to be honest, I contacted a local policeman to follow up on this story. But it turns out that you cannot prove after 2,100 years that that stream was named after an incident that happened while Spartacus was there. That would be a stretch.

But the fact is that those are the names. That's the toponym, says "torrente," a "watercourse." It doesn't say "of." It says, "watercourse, slave on a pole," or "watercourse, slave impaled," or "watercourse, slave palisaded."

OK, palisade is also critical because according to Appian, one of the two ancient historians, the fortification system built by Crassus included a ditch, a wall, and a palisade.

So what to make of a name like this? In my report now in the course of publication, I don't elaborate or I don't put too much emphasis or stock on this and other place names that are in the area. This is the only one in the area of the battlefield on the wall. Nothing around it. So evocative, to coin a phrase used by an American historian about these place names.

But the fact is, we have this place name. To make a long story short, today I wrote, I sent a message to a friendly policeman who controls the territory. He runs a police station on the mountains in the area of the fortifications and the site.

And I said, since we're friendly, I said, I need to ask you an important question. Do you know if the last name, "slave," "Schiavo," is common in your territory, or if it's found anywhere, if you have people named "Schiavo," i.e. "slave," in your territory, in your jurisdiction? And if so, if this last name is rare or frequent or frequently found.

I'm waiting for an answer. Why? Because it's also possible that this entire name is modern. Like is 200 or 300 years old. And then the name Schiavo, which means slave in Italian, is actually a last name, the name of a property owner who was named Schiavo, slave in Italian, and who happened to own land where the battlefield is, near the wall.

On the other hand, the last word of the phrase, "watercourse, slave on a pole" or "impaled" or "on a palisade" or "palisaded," the last name is good Latin. The word "palato" comes from Latin, and it does mean "palisaded," "built with poles," et cetera, et cetera. That is a good ancient word, and I know I can prove that word was already in the area at least 300 years ago, maybe 400 years ago. If he was there 400 years ago, probably he was there maybe 1,000 years ago.

But I don't know if the combination makes sense in regard or with reference to Spartacus, because it would be quite unusual for something like that to have survived almost 2,100 years and to be part now of Italian toponymy. It's so far-fetched that a serious scholar would not consider that. But never say never. Never say never.

TOM MUSGRAVE: Well, I'm glad you mentioned earlier that archaeology is a science, reminding us that it is a science that requires rigorous scrutiny of anything that's found. I think sometimes we forget that, seeing movies where it's being practiced and whatnot.
I want to ask you to put your art history professor or your art history background on for a moment and tell us when you realized what you had found. Did you start visualizing, imagining was what it was like when there were soldiers there manning that line? And--

PAOLO VISONA: It's easy to answer, thank you. And I can answer in the affirmative. I did it almost immediately. Maybe because archaeology also means to be fully embedded into the environment of your site.

So let's say you dig a fort. You have to think about, especially if you were in the army and I was, you have to think about the implications of having a fort at that particular spot. In this case, what are the implications of having a wall and a ditch in this forest and on this ridge? Because we're still on the ridge.

By the way. The wall essentially is on the very top of the ridge going from East to West. So it basically crosses the ridge from East to West. Then when the ridge ends, because it begins to drop off very sharply towards the Western side, the Western coast of Italy, the wall also ends. The fortification also ends. And it does so, I believe, for obvious reasons. Nobody could go down and impassable slope.
But yes, I personally walked the wall half a dozen times. And each time, mentally but also taking notes I was looking for, I was looking for the kind of terrain that was good for cavalry. That was my main preoccupation.

I knew where the Roman lines were, because I was walking on top of them. So I knew that going from east to west, the Romans would have been on my right, and Spartacus and his horde would have been on my left, trying to break through the Roman lines.

So without taking sides, without thinking, I'm now on the Roman side and I'm waiting for the enemy, or without thinking, I'm with Spartacus. And I've got to go across this ditch and wall combo, I was thinking of what it would be like to come towards the Roman defenses.

I wasn't looking to my right into the Roman lines. I was looking always to my left and see whether the terrain was conducive to a cavalry attack, assault, because Appian, the second major historian, tells us that Spartacus was waiting for cavalry to arrive before he made his attempt successfully to penetrate the Roman lines.

So I knew that cavalry was part of the equation, but I'm not sure whether it's true, because frankly, I don't put too much stock in what the ancient sources tell us.

Why? First of all, I'm an archaeologist and not an historian. I've been trained not to trust, let's say, historical interpretations or literary sources, because I need physical evidence. This is where we part company with our friends from ancient history and so forth. We need physical evidence.

If that physical evidence fits, the historical account is fine and dandy. Very often, it does not. And it's very difficult to reconcile the literary sources with the archaeological evidence, or with the physical evidence. Not necessarily archaeological, maybe just even topographical.

So because I knew about the cavalry part, which comes strictly from Appian, I was looking at the terrain. And I even went into the woods, checking how the distance between the wall and as far as I could go on level ground before I was stopped by underbrush, and because I had time little time at my disposal before I had to go back to continue my field walking.

So I did take notes saying oh, I got here 300 yards of fairly level cavalry country. They could have come from this direction towards the wall. That was a preoccupation because the terrain was not uniform. It was rolling. And at some point, it began to ascend towards a slope.

And I figure, no, that's not a good way for cavalry, especially because there's a problem of going downhill. I'm just making an example. Also, there's at least one major, there's three, one major watercourse along the way. And the wall and ditch stop in front of this watercourse. This watercourse is-- it can easily cross it, of course. Maybe it's a couple of feet deep now, but it's maybe 10, 15 wide. And the terrain here changes dramatically because now it slopes up and it's rocky and craggy and so forth.
So no, this is not--

TOM MUSGRAVE: Hard for horses to--

PAOLO VISONA: Hard for horses. But then again, I also thought, well, what if they came down, They came? In order not to make noise, they follow the watercourse and then they broke through the wall because especially if there was no wall, because of the watercourse, there would have been a soft point to try to penetrate.

The defenses were not totally hermetic, and if there was a gap because of the watercourse, perhaps after they scouted out the area, Spartacus' troops could have followed the stream to try to break through that weak point. All of this was in my mind.

So to answer your question, I was extremely aware of my surroundings, especially towards the end when the ground began to slope off dramatically and say, no, they cannot come this way. This is way too steep. Towards the end, in particular, the land slopes down towards a gully, a very deep gully. And then, on the other side of the gully, the land also slopes down very steeply.

So I said no, no, they could not have come through here because it's steep coming down, and it's steep going up. Assuming you penetrate the gully, which is at least 10 feet deep, which means you simply cannot not--

TOM MUSGRAVE: Not worth attacking, not worth defending.

PAOLO VISONA: No, absolutely not. Not only that, but the Romans had-- the war ended right there for a reason, and turned for a reason. In other words, that would have been heavily fortified. Because it was a spot where they might have tried to go through there as well. The Romans did not leave anything open to chance. So again, to make a very long story short, I was fully aware of my surroundings. And this is part of, I guess, being an archaeologist. You live in nature and you're constantly aware of your terrain. Because terrain is 90% or 100%.

There is a reason why there is a site, and the terrain has to be understood. Because it's functional to the presence of the site. In this case, the ditch and the wall have to be understood in relation to the surrounding ground. And I did only half the job. Because I only looked at the Spartacus site. I did not look at the Roman site, although I must confess I got lost three times. And I got lost coming through the Roman site, in trying to go back to my car, after I went to the end of the wall. And then I thought I was taking a shortcut, because I've seen a trail that might have gone in the right direction. And then the trail ended and I was in up the creek, as it were.

But luckily I had a compass. That's how I always found my way back. But because of three-- getting lost three times, I had a good opportunity to actually see the terrain in the back of the Roman wall, and say, jeez, this is immensely tricky and rugged. And I convinced myself, if this is so rugged, how could Spartacus have made it through, and around the Roman fortifications at night? Because we know it was at night. The sources agree that it happened at night, right? And possibly in the middle of a snowstorm. How could he have done that without getting lost, as I got lost?

And my conclusion was, he must have had guides. There is no way that at night, considering how tricky the terrain, difficult, rugged, dangerous the terrain was, thousands of people could have traipsed across the Roman wall, which was already a problem, because you have to go through sentries and barriers, and so on, and then get around the Roman fortifications to drop down to the pass, cross the pass, and get as far as you can, as fast as you can. How can they do that?

And I convinced myself, it must have met locals who showed him a way around the Roman lines. But the fact is, the terrain was rugged. So I've learned also my lesson. What is behind the Roman wall? And this raises all kinds of other questions. If the Romans were there, where did they live? I mean, if they were, guarding the wall, where do they live? They could not be just standing there, with their shields, and armor, and javelins, just waiting for Spartacus. So there must have been some kind of barracks, some kind of-- just like in World War I, in the trenches, they must have had all kinds of-- behind the lines, they must have had anything from field hospitals, to anything.

So where were the Romans when they were manning their fortifications? This is a huge question. I wish I had time to investigate that, or the chance to investigate that. But I have an answer. The Italians, as I told you, have conducted their own investigations in September and October. And they have found many ruins. They found wall alignments, rock tumbles, meaning collapsed structures, behind the Roman wall. In the place where I was lost, they have had two months to really comb that area with lots of people, and so on. And they say that they found many ruins, of course, totally unexplored, totally unexcavated.

And these many ruins could in fact be where the Romans had their shelter, where they had their, maybe stables. So where they had supplies and store rooms, because we are at 3,000 to 4,000 feet, it's above 1,000 meters, or so. It's incredibly-- right now, there's probably 3 feet of snow. Because the weather has been-- the winter has been very bad in Calabria this year, especially in that area, which is among the highest in the region. But whether or not this happened, this episode happened, in late fall or early winter, it gets colder. And they would have had shelter. They needed permanent shelter. And they didn't have sleeping bags--

TOM MUSGRAVE: Not just a temporary encampment.

PAOLO VISONA: No, exactly. And you've read my work. So I speculated where they could have been based. And I speculate that they were living in tents, essentially, because I sort of anticipate-- Spartacus attempt to break through the Roman lines, I place it in the late fall, rather than the winter. There are several schools of thought about when this happened, because Plutarch, and only Plutarch, says that it happened at night, and when the weather was cold, and it was a snowy night. So many historians have jumped to conclusions that this was the dead of winter.

Some of them have placed this in February. Some of them even early April. And I don't think that that's the case. I think that it was much earlier in the season, based on my own reasoning. So I would say that would have been anywhere between late September, and perhaps late November, or something like that. Somewhere like that, late fall, not even not even early winter. And therefore it would still be possible for the Romans to tent. But that is something that has to be proved, again, archaeologically. Because you can prove this archaeologically.

TOM MUSGRAVE: How?

PAOLO VISONA: Very easy, tent pegs. Tent pegs is a diagnostic find. I did not find tent pegs, I don't think. One, maybe. But the classic tent peg is an iron stake, obviously pointed, with a ring at the top. And this is a diagnostic Roman military item that is found wherever there are Roman camps, not necessarily battlefields, because why do you need a tent on the battlefield? But where there is Roman encampments, and temporary, or not, you have tent pegs. And finding a tent pegs is automatic evidence that the Romans were there. All you need is one tent peg, and you've proven the whole scenario. It's unbelievable.

TOM MUSGRAVE: I want to wrap up by asking a two-part question of you. What does this discovery mean for the field of archaeology? And then, what does this mean for the University of Kentucky?

PAOLO VISONA: For the field of archaeology, it's a biggie, because it's the very first evidence of a battlefield specific to an episode in Spartacus War that we know from literary sources. In other words, we do know that Crassus had built fortifications because two major historians, independently of each other, say this. And we know that Spartacus broke through those fortifications.

Now, for the first time, we have located those fortifications. It's the first time in 200 years, 200 years of debates, largely among historians, by the way. Because archaeologists were not part of the picture. No archaeologists have ever set out to find Crassus fortifications as a specific project. That's not how things work, I suppose, in archaeology. It would be a project that an American team would consider, but not in Italy. They would not roam the woods looking for evidence of Crassus fortifications.

So because, again, it entails a whole research project that is focused on solving this particular problem-- so that research project was never even considered. No one set out to say, I'm going to find Crassus fortifications. So to have identified Crassus fortifications is a major find, in the sense that it solves an historical problem. We now know exactly where Crassus built his fortifications. We also know that, based on the evidence, what we have is vastly different from what Plutarch, in particular, said that Crassus had built.

Plutarch, if you remember, stated that Crassus built a system that went from coast to coast and was something like 50, some kilometers long, in kilometers, right? In miles would have been 30 to 40 miles. I don't remember now the exact thing. I don't want to make stuff up. But he says 300 stadia, which is a Greek unit of measure, which amounts to roughly 53 point something kilometers. Well, what we do know, based on the latest technology, is that the system was 3.3 kilometers long.

And this is not even my data. This is data that comes from the latest Italian LiDAR investigations. And they used a drone-mounted LiDAR, which must have cost a pretty penny, to resurvey the area. And they stated, at a conference in November, that this was the actual length. And I have no reason to disbelieve them. But Plutarch says it was 53 kilometers. In reality, it's 3.3. We said it was not even 2.7, like 2.69, something. So there is progress.

But the most important thing is that we have tied the historical sources to a very specific site that we put on the map. So we've done our job, in the sense of having found a previously unknown site, and the first site to be connected specifically with Spartacus. Because Spartacus was involved in several battles with the Romans. And none of these other sites has been identified. Spartacus has also been connected with destruction, documented archaeologically, at various sites.

I, for one, 26 years ago, wrote in a book, in an excavation report, that the site that I excavated was most probably destroyed by Spartacus. Because everything checked, in terms of the fines, the time period, and so on. But I did not have the kind of evidence that was uncovered last year. This was one of many sites that was attacked by Spartacus and was destroyed. Well, thank you very much. He had to live, and he raided the countryside in order to feed his troops. So I found one of these sites.

There were other sites that had a similar story, evidence of destruction, and evidence that could be tied chronologically to this period. But we have now a site that, in fact, is described in the ancient literary sources as the site that Crassus specifically fortified. So it is interesting because for archaeology, for Italian archaeology in particular, which-- and I'm not the one who said it, basically is in its infancy, when it comes to battlefield archaeology. For Italian archaeology, the site is tremendously important. Because it is also a site that offers some evidence about Roman military architecture on this scale.

The ditch and wall system is a Roman unique system of fortification that is adopted by Romans on many battlefields. Caesar comes to mind as the premier example of using this technique, of this strategy of fortifications in Gaul, what is today's France. Many examples also come from Spain, where we have other battlefields of the late Republican period. So this is a standard type of Roman military architecture. But it's the first time that we have this type of architecture in Calabria, and in Italy.

It's a major find. It will take years to explore, to mine the wealth of information that can be obtained by investigating this system. Because with it, if properly studied, will also come other finds, finds of military equipment, coming from Roman armor, Roman weaponry, you name it, Roman hobnails from Roman sandals, and so on. So if this is studied, and it will take years, it will actually be a phenomenal, incredible source of information about the Roman army at this particular point in time, which is the late 70s, or the first century BCE.

We don't have a single example in the entire Italian Peninsula of a battlefield and of this type of military architecture. Not one. And now we have one. And it's complete, 3.3 kilometers worth of it. So if my Italian colleagues are worth their salt, they will spend years, with multiple teams, investigating this area. And they have already begun by establishing an archaeological grid of dozens and dozens of 100 by 100-meter squares over the entire battlefield area, from the start-- from the beginning to the end, so that each of these squares can be investigated separately.

It can be subdivided, and then it can be explored with metal detectors, with magnetometers, and so on, to see if there is material. Because you cannot excavate the whole thing, it would be astronomically expensive and incredibly time-consuming. It would take hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of people to do this. Battlefield archaeology is done with metal detectors, and of course with surgical excavation, where you have concentrations of metal, you know that that's where you should excavate.

So from an archaeological standpoint, it's going to be a tremendously important addition to what we know about the Roman army in the 70s of the first century BCE, 20 years before Caesar. Because so far, the best evidence is Caesar's campaigns in Gaul 20 years later, in the late 50s and early 40s. That's why most battlefields are found in France. But also in Germany, because Caesar conquered a very large area into Switzerland, even. So for archaeology, it's going to be an important thing. For history, as I said, we solved the problem, because now all these various theories of, where was Crassus? Just like, where is Waldo? Same thing.

Now, we know exactly where he was. And finally, for the University of Kentucky. For the University of Kentucky, first of all, is the honor and glory of having had a team from the University of Kentucky that were very, I would say, few individuals, so very agile, but with all the basic equipment, was able to reason it out and put it on the map and above all, to prove it. Because the actual work that we did was in, basically, no more than 7 to 10 days. In fact, the geophysics was done in three days.

The metal detecting was done in three days. I'm talking about three episodes, right? So we were able to connect the dots and to reach our conclusions in an incredibly short time. Because we were, first of all, highly motivated, we knew that territory, and we were able to understand the topography, and to actually prove our theory, our thesis, very, very quickly, even though we had all kinds of problems. For example, we had a major malfunction with the GPR.

All of our ground-penetrating radar data had to be thrown out because the instrument malfunctioned. In other words, as he was encoding the data, something happened, and everything had to be thrown out. When you process it, it's all gibberish. But luckily, we had a backup instrument, and the backup instrument proved-- it provided sufficient evidence to confirm our theory. Plus, of course, we had the coring samples, so we could draw profiles of the ditch and the wall at three widely separated areas.

Because we did not just attack one area of the wall. We did it three times, at three specific areas, so that, again, we could have overwhelming and conclusive evidence that this was, in fact, the case, that we had the ditch and the wall over a very long, let's say, long length, it sounds redundant. But over a long stretch of the fortifications. And of course, then we had the metal finds. The metal finds were the cherries on the cake.

Because they were the definitive evidence that we had-- that indeed we had a battlefield of the early first century BCE. It was sort of making everything click into focus, after we've done the geophysics. So we had enough convincing evidence. But when you pick up a javelin point, I mean that-- it sort of stops you in your tracks, because you have conclusive evidence. And I'm saying conclusive very humbly, because it has taken a long, long time, also, to research and investigate these items.

Remember that only 33% of our metal finds were ancient. But in the last six or seven months, I had to go through hundreds of publications to gather conclusive, corroborating evidence that, in fact, these were what I said they were. This was the hilt of a dagger. This was a javelin point, and so forth. And we have-- after all, we have maybe half a dozen critical finds, enough. Some might say, well, not enough. Well yeah, you can say not enough. But look at what we did in a few days. There's going to be a lot more there to be found, hopefully.

But we were lucky enough, and we are grateful enough to have found these objects because altogether, this evidence appears to be-- I want to be that-- the word is not modest, but I don't want to be that-- I don't want to be so cocksure to say, oh, of course, there's no question. No, I want to even leave a margin of-- a margin of possibility. But I want to say that even with that margin, the evidence we found is so, short of overwhelming, is so massive. It's so convincing, if you will, that I feel confident that we have the real McCoy.

This is not something else. Because some doubts have been voiced. And let's not forget that my report is being read by referees who are supposed to be top scholars in the field. They will find-- if there's anything wrong with my conclusions, that will be pointed out, and I will have to grapple with it. You also need to consider the fact that the Italian government pumped in almost half a million dollars, within the space of a couple of months, to start major investigations of the area. Would they have done that unless they were convinced that this was, in fact, an important find that needed to be prioritized, to the extent of sending so much money and activating a major Italian university, and so on, to continue the investigations?

So there is reason to be optimistic that this is, in fact, what we say it is. And I haven't even talked about all the aspects of the topography, the military implications of having fortified that particular area, instead of others, and so on. Because this is a work in progress. You have read what I've written. And so my thinking. There's been a lot of thinking about-- in various directions. Because we are trying to claim credit for having arrived at these conclusions in the name of our institution, and with all the talent that we could amass in this country.

And also, with feedback from other scholars around the world. We want to claim that credit because this is how we operate. This is an example of how the University of Kentucky, also, approaches problems of this kind. It's science. It's not supposition. And it has to be something that stands the test of time, can be verified by further research, and in fact, it has been verified. Because the Italians have basically redone the work we have done, and they have reached the same conclusion.

So what I'm trying to say is that this is not tentative and preliminary. It has already been validated by two months of Italian research, with all the tools at their disposal, much more, and with many more people than we had. So it's a great achievement. We have to be proud of the fact that we did this with a squad of 4 people, in 7 to 10 days, and without bragging, without making waves.
But we wanted to make sure that the world knew about this, and the AIA did this, and UK did this, and CNN did this. I'm saying I'm very, very proud that we did this. Because it's also an example of how we do archaeological research.

TOM MUSGRAVE: Well, Dr. Paolo Visona, we congratulate you on your discovery this past summer in southern Italy. And we thank you for being on Behind the Blue.

PAOLO VISONA: It was entirely my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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TOM MUSGRAVE: Thanks for listening to Behind the Blue. Behind the Blue is a joint production of the University of Kentucky and UK HealthCare. For more stories about UK and UK HealthCare, visit uknow.uky.edu.