Ancient slingstones found in northeastern Spain may be evidence of a local uprising against Roman rule in the first century B.C.
Archaeologists think the lead sling "bullets" were fired by Roman soldiers after an ambush orchestrated by the local Indigenous Ceretani (also spelled Cerretani) people, who by this time had spent almost 200 years resisting Roman expansion in Iberia.
The findings, which were unearthed during an archaeological survey of the area, reinforce that "the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was neither a brief nor a peaceful process," researchers explained in a statement from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
The ancient Roman historian Cassius Dio (who lived from around A.D. 150 to 235) wrote that the Ceretani revolt took place in 39 B.C., but it was generally thought to have occurred farther west. The new finds, however, pinpoint an ancient Roman military camp in what's now Cerdanya, a region...
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