The hypothesis returns that the Riace Bronzes would have been found in the sea of Sicily, in the seabed of Brucoli (Syracuse), where they sank during the thefts of the Romans in 212 BC. Added to this is another suggestive hypothesis: the statues, hidden by archaeotraffickers in the seabed of Riace in Calabria waiting to be sold abroad, were discovered. A reconstruction, which dates back to the 1980s, by the American archaeologist Robert Ross Holloway, who however was never able to produce concrete scientific evidence to support it. For some years Anselmo Madeddu, a doctor and scholar from Syracuse, has been proposing this thesis trying to provide scientific bases.
First the study with the universities of Catania and Ferrara which proved the correspondence between the bronze welding soils and that of the mouth of the Anapo river. Now a multidisciplinary study published in the Italian journal of Geosciences, the international scientific journal of the Italian Geological Society, would prove that the Riace bronzes would have been in seabeds different from those of Riace for two millennia. The scientific work, in which 15 scholars participated, including geologists, archaeologists, historians, paleontologists, marine biologists, experts in metal alloys and underwater archaeology, many of whom hold the position of full or associate professors in six universities (Catania, Ferrara, Cagliari, Bari, Pavia and Reggio Calabria), would bring innovation to the study of the original underwater position of the statues, in particular the patinas of alteration and the marine biota settled on their surface. It would be shown that the signs of the position of the two statues in the shallow seabed of Riace (8 metres) date back to a few months before their discovery (August 1972). On the other hand, the presence of “circalittoral serpulids, coral crusts and copper sulphide patinas”, typical of poorly lit and highly anaerobic environments (between 70 and 90 meters deep) would prove that the statues must have lain for over two millennia in seabeds very different from those of Riace, much deeper and compatible with those of the Sicilian Ionian coast of Brucoli.
«The greatest innovation of this research – say Madeddu and Professor Rosolino Cirrincione, geologist at the University of Catania – is that it is the first scientific work that integrates into a single interpretative proposal both the new data emerging from the research and that deriving from the critical review of the most solid scientific evidence already in existence, through a multidisciplinary approach capable of returning a unitary, coherent and overall reading of the history of the statues». «The most interesting innovation lies precisely in the integration between geological and archaeological data: a collaboration that also paves the way for future developments in forensic geology», states Rodolfo Carosi, president of the Italian Geological Society.
The “mystery” of the Bronzes also includes several testimonies collected in Brucoli on “suspicious” movements in the seabed in the Seventies. And then always the hypothesis of a third bronze, with other statues and weapons.