The Riace Bronzes, the famous pair of Greek bronze statues from the 5th century representing two hoplite warriors found in 1972 and currently exhibited in Reggio Calabria in an excellent state of preservation, could originate from eastern Sicily, probably from Brucoli, according to a recent study published in the journal Italian Journal of Geosciences which proposes a hypothesis according to which they remained for two thousand years in deep seabeds, before being moved and left in the shallow seabed of Riace. Analysis of metal, marine biota and microorganisms support this hypothesis, already advanced in the 1980s. Combining geology, archeology and marine biology, the research reopens the history of the Bronzes, keeping their charm alive even fifty years after their discovery.
The Riace Bronzes were brought to light by a diver, Stefano Mariottini, who by chance came across what would become among the most famous discoveries of Italian archaeology, at around 8 meters deep. The statues, weighing over 160 kg each, are still striking today for their attention to detail and surprising naturalism. They depict two warriors, perhaps heroes or mythical figures, and over time they have fueled different theories on their origin: from Calabria to the Peloponnese, up to eastern Sicily. They were probably part of a larger group and traveled a long way before ending up at sea. After complex restorations, they are now preserved in the Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria.
According to the Italian journal of Geosciences, the Bronzes remained on the Sicilian seabed for two millennia before being found off the coast of Calabria. This is the return of the so-called “Sicilian hypothesis” launched in the 1980s by the American archaeologist Robert Ross Holloway, according to which the Bronzes sank in Sicily during the Roman sackings in Syracuse in 212 BC, during the Second Punic War.
The research – which involved 15 scholars, including geologists, archaeologists, historians, paleontologists, marine biologists, experts in metal alloys and underwater archaeology, many of them professors at the universities of Catania, Ferrara, Cagliari, Bari, Pavia and Reggio Calabria – starts from an analysis conducted in 1995 by the Central Institute for Restoration, which highlighted that the clays used for welding the different parts of the statues and for the pins in terracotta with which they were welded had different geochemical compositions.
The data collected compare the clays of the statues with those of the alluvial plain between the rivers Anapo and Ciane and of the hill of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, also in Syracuse, finding correspondences with the clays of the statues (total for Statue A and partial for Statue B), confirming the hypothesis that their origin is Sicilian and not Calabrian.
Not only that, by studying the biological remains present on the Bronzes and the chemical composition of the patinas that cover them, and comparing them with the characteristics of the seabed of Riace, the researchers discovered something surprising: the statues seem to have remained for centuries in another type of sea, much deeper, before arriving where they were found in 1972. The marks left on the bottom by the statues seem to date back only to a few months before the discovery. The oldest patinas, however, tell us that for over two thousand years the Bronzes would have remained in a different seabed, much deeper and compatible with that off the coast of Brucoli, on the Sicilian Ionian coast.
“The biggest news of this research“, the scholar Anselmo Madeddu and professor Rosolino Cirrincione, geologist from the University of Catania, told ANSA, “it is the first scientific work that integrates into a single interpretative proposal both the new data emerging from the research and those deriving from the critical review of the most solid scientific evidence already existing, through a multidisciplinary approach capable of returning a unitary, coherent and overall reading of the history of the statues“.
