MALÅ MIRA 3D Ground Penetrating Radar Array system discovers gladiator-training camp
“This is a world sensation, in the true meaning of the word”, said Lower Austrian provincial Governor, Erwin Pröll. Governor Pröll was referring to the discovery of the ruins of a gladiator school, near Petronell-Carnuntum in Austria, made by the MALÅ MIRA 3D GPR (ground penetrating radar) Array system and publicly unveiled on Monday 5 September 2011.
Virtual model of the gladiator training camp
with the amphitheater in the background
The most sensational discovery last year was the ‘third circle’ at Stonehenge but other important finds were also made at Uppåkra, Sweden and Vestfold, Norway.
LBI collecting data using MALÅ MIRA 3D
ground penetrating radar system
This new find at Petronell-Carnuntum is believed to be a gladiator-training complex that prepared gladiators for combat at the nearby amphitheater. It is part of a 10-square kilometer (3.9-square mile) site over a former city of 50,000 inhabitants – an archaeological site now visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists a year.
Excavations of the new find are being planned for the future but officials say they have no start date yet since experts need time to settle on a plan that conserves as much as possible of the ruins. “If one has a major injury then you first do a series of CT scans before you let a surgeon do his work,” explained Wolfgang Neubauer, director of the Ludwig Bolzman Institute for Archaeological Prospecting and Virtual Archaeology, describing the caution required for planning such excavations.
Archaeological excavation at Petronell-Carnuntum began already around 1870 but due to the enormity of what lies beneath and the painstaking process of restoring what already has been unearthed, less than one percent of the site has been excavated. Neubauer explained that an unusual and unexplained, “white spot”, on an aerial photograph led experts to scan the area with MALÅ MIRA 3D GPR Array system. The state-of-the-art MIRA GPR 3D Array system produced a detailed three-dimensional image of the sub surface, revealing the gladiator complex. “MALÅ MIRA 3D GPR Array system delivers a clarity we normally find only in the field of medicine,” continuing the medical analogy for the use of the GPR technology in archeology.
LBI collecting data using MALÅ MIRA 3D ground penetrating radar system
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LBI ArchPro (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology) is a newly initiated interdisciplinary research institute for novel, large-scale, high definition archaeological prospection and virtual realization. The institute, which is based in Vienna, includes eight European partner organizations, covering academic institutes, research organizations, such as the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU), government agencies such as the Province of Lower Austria (NoeL), the Swedish National Heritage Board (UV), the Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz - Germany (RGZM), the Technological University of Vienna (TU-Wien) with the Institute for Computer Graphics and Algorithms and the Institute for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, the University of Vienna (UNI Wien), the Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science (VIAS) and the Department for Prehistory and Early Medieval History, The Visual and Spatial Technology Centre (VISTA) at the University of Birmingham, and the Department of Geophysics at the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG).
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