Ruins in Austria housed gladiators

Ruins in Austria housed gladiators

Unveiled Monday were the well-preserved ruins of a gladiator school in Austria, where men lived in cells barely big enough to turn around in and usually fought until they died. The Carnuntum ruins are part of a city of 50,000 people 28 miles east of Vienna that flourished about 1,700 years ago, a major military and trade outpost linking the far-flung Roman empire's Asian boundaries to its central and northern European lands. Mapped out by radar, the ruins of the gladiator school remain underground. Yet officials say the find rivals the famous Ludus Magnus — the largest of the gladiatorial training schools in Rome — in its structure. And they say the Austrian site is even more detailed than the well-known Roman ruin, down to the remains of a thick wooden post in the middle of the training area, a mock enemy that young, desperate gladiators hacked away at centuries ago. It was definitely a school of hard knocks. "A gladiator school was a mixture of a barracks and a prison, kind of a high-security facility," said the Roemisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, one of the institutes involved in finding and evaluating the discovery. "The fighters were often convicted criminals, prisoners-of-war, and usually slaves." The complex also contained about 40 tiny sleeping cells for the gladiators; a large bathing area; a training hall with heated floors and assorted administrative buildings. Outside the walls, radar scans show what archaeologists believe was a cemetery for those killed during training.

Flock of unintended consequences

It has been a dozen years since the federal government moved thousands of black-capped squawking seabirds to East Sand Island, Wash., to reduce their diet of endangered fish. Things haven't exactly gone as planned. The hope in relocating the world's largest colony of Caspian terns to the sandy mound was that they'd eat more sardines and herring — and fewer young salmon and steelhead. And they have. But this year dive-bombing eagles and marauding gulls kept the colony from producing a single chick. Even with that bizarre turn, the number of threatened fish slurped by birds is higher now than it has ever been: This same desolate scratch of ground has also become home to the West Coast's largest gathering of double-crested cormorants. "It's alarming. They're eating our lunch, basically," said Gary Fredricks, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist. Critics maintain that fish-eating birds are a distraction from what really ails Columbia fish stocks — troubled fish habitat and hatcheries, hydropower dams and fishing. But there may be no better place than East Sand Island to see how unintended consequences can upend human efforts to re-engineer the animal kingdom.

Times wires