Principal Investigator: David Stone
The series of three Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage marked a turning point in world history. They gave Rome a victory over Carthage, its greatest rival, and dominance over the western half of the Mediterranean Sea. The victory laid the groundwork for Rome’s conquest of the rest of the Mediterranean and 600 years of imperial rule. A counterfactual scenario in which the Carthaginian general Hannibal defeated Rome would have changed the trajectory of ancient history and resulted in a much more prominent role for Carthage.
The discoveries of several ancient Mediterranean battle sites during the last 30 years (Battles of Himera, 480 and 409 BCE; Battle of the Granicus River, 334 BCE; Battle of the Aegates Islands, 241 BCE; Battle of Baecula 208 BCE; Battle in the Third Servile War, 71 BCE; Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, 9 CE) have encouraged us to think that we might succeed in finding one of the pivotal battles of these wars, which were fought in Italy, Tunisia, and Spain. Several of these battle sites, such as those at Cannae, Lake Trasimene, and Zama, have never been clearly identified.
The initial goal is to find an ancient battle site, but if we are successful, we hope to initiate subsequent studies focused on what we can learn about the lives and deaths of the soldiers who fought there through investigations of their DNA, pathologies, diets, and weapons. Michigan archaeologists will work closely with local archaeologists, who are expected to make prominent contributions to the discovery of the battle site. The collaboration will also include both local and Michigan experts in drone imaging, geophysics, and GIS.
Meet the Principal Investigator
David Stone is an archaeologist with 30 years of experience conducting fieldwork on the Iron Age through late Roman periods of North Africa and Greece. His research takes a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to address current questions about ancient cities, empires, and landscapes. A main contribution of his work has been to chronicle the “biography” of Leptiminus, an important yet previously poorly known ancient port city on the east coast of Tunisia. Fieldwork at Leptiminus gave him ideas for investigating other cities with the aim of writing additional “urban biographies.” At Olynthos, in northern Greece, he directed a field survey to examine issues of identity formation at the household, neighborhood, and city-wide scales. As codirector of the Pella Urban Dynamics Project in Greece, he has more recently been investigating the story of a third city that flourished as the royal capital of Macedon in the first millennium BCE and then became a colony of the Roman empire 300 years later.
