A gladiator graveyard was discovered at Ephesus.

The Ephesus graves containing thousands of bones were found along with three gravestones, clearly depicting gladiators.

Two pathologists at the Medical University of Vienna – Professor Karl Grossschmidt and Professor Fabian Kanz – have spent much of the past five years painstakingly cataloguing and forensically analysing every single bone for age, injury and cause of death.

They found at least 67 individuals, nearly all aged 20 to 30.

What’s even more interesting is that they discovered signs of gladiators’ lives being taken (as opposed to death by combat) in two different ways: one evidence of death in the ring where “a kneeling man (had) a sword rammed through down his throat into the heart” and the other was death after a fight out of the ring because “a number of the skulls showed rectangular holes that could not have been made by any of the known gladiator weapons. Instead, they suggest the use of a heavy hammer…”‘One possible explanation, which is supported by a number of archaeologists, is that there must have been an assistant in the arena who basically gave the gladiator the coup de grace'”

I find it pretty fascinating how much sociological detail can be gleaned from a graveyard.