Radar Finds Preserved Roman Gladiator School

Archeologists near Vienna, Austria, say underground radar has made a spectacular find: a Roman gladiator school that appears to be in better shape than any found so far, reports Der Spiegel. It even still has the wooden post used to represent an opponent in the arena. Don't bank on seeing it anytime soon, however. No plans are yet in place to start excavating the site, which lies beneath the former Roman settlement of Carnuntum.

"A gladiator school was a mixture of a barracks and a prison, kind of a high-security facility," says a statement by one of the institutes involved in the find, notes AP. "The fighters were often convicted criminals, prisoners-of-war, and usually slaves." The discovery should provide new insights into the fighters who lived and died—scientists think they've spotted a gladiator cemetery, too—about 1,700 years ago. (More Austria stories.)