Iron Age · Late 3rd century BC · Colina de los Quemados, Córdoba, Andalusia, Spain
Elephant bone and catapult stones from Second Punic War found in Córdoba, Spain
A wrist bone from an elephant's right foreleg, found under a collapsed adobe wall at Iberian Corduba, may be a rare physical trace of Carthage's war elephants.
Peer-reviewed paper
Colina de los Quemados, Córdoba, Spain A single elephant bone found in Córdoba, southern Spain, has been dated to the late 4th–3rd century BC. It came from an Iron Age layer. Archaeologists think it most likely dates from the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), when Carthage kept war elephants in the peninsula.
Apart from ivory, elephant skeletal remains are extremely rare at European archaeological sites. The team says the bone may be one of the few pieces of direct evidence for the use of these animals in Classical Antiquity in western Europe.
Rafael M. Martínez Sánchez, Agustín López Jiménez, Santiago Guillamón Dávila and colleagues published the study in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Its title calls it a preliminary analysis.
The bone came from a rescue excavation in March 2020, carried out before the expansion of the Provincial Hospital of Córdoba. Archaeologists dug a trench on the southern slope of Colina de los Quemados. This hill is identified with the Iberian oppidum, or fortified town, of Corduba.
The site sits on a terrace above the Guadalquivir. It was occupied from the Late Bronze Age to the Islamic medieval period. In its Late Iron Age phase it had streets, ovens and industrial installations.
The excavators found the bone beneath the collapse of an adobe wall, in a late Iron Age level of occupation and abandonment. It is a cuboid bone about 10 centimetres long. Its size and shape matched no known Iberian land animal.
The team compared it with anatomical collections at the University of Valladolid and Leiden University. These included two female Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and a steppe mammoth. The researchers identified the bone as the third carpal, or os magnum, of an elephant's right foreleg.
Catapult stones and a Carthaginian coin in the same layer
The layer held other finds that point to fighting. There were up to twelve stone spheres, about 11 centimetres across and weighing 1.4 kilograms. The authors identify them as ammunition for lithoboloi or petroboloi, torsion catapults that threw stones.
The excavators also recovered a heavy arrowhead of the kind fired by a scorpio, a bolt-throwing siege weapon. A Carthaginian coin of the "Helmet" type (a quadrans) came from the same layer. It was minted at Cartagena between 237 and 206 BC. Stamped pottery and Hispanic annular brooches date the deposit to the 3rd century BC.
The bone's collagen was too poorly preserved for standard radiocarbon dating. Instead, the team dated its mineral fraction (bioapatite). The result, late 4th to 3rd century BC, is slightly broader and earlier than expected.
The authors still consider the date consistent with the Second Punic War. It also rules out both a modern bone and a Pleistocene fossil.
Similar catapult stones and scorpio points have been found at other Iberian sites besieged or attacked in the same period. They include Kissa (Tarragona), Akra Leuke (Alicante), Castillo de Doña Blanca (Cádiz), Iliturgi (Jaén) and the oppidum of Puente Tablas (Jaén).
Six ways an elephant could have reached Corduba
Working from classical texts, the authors set out six possible scenarios. These range from the Carthaginian invasion under Hamilcar Barca in 237 BC to the later use of elephants in Roman spectacles. The authors judge that the radiocarbon date and the military finds make the Second Punic War the most plausible.
Polybius and Livy report that Hamilcar, Hasdrubal and Hannibal kept between one and two hundred elephants in Iberia at the start of the war. No ancient author records a major battle at Corduba. The team argues that skirmishes or sieges there may simply have gone unrecorded.
In their view, a violent episode, probably a siege or attack, may have contributed to the abandonment of the oppidum. It may also have contributed to the later foundation of the Roman city.
Which species the animal was remains open. Ancient writers describe Carthage's African elephants as smaller than the Asian elephants used by the Seleucids. This has led some to propose they were forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis). Recent genetic studies, on the other hand, suggest the Ptolemies may have trained savanna elephants.
The Córdoba bone is larger than those of the female Asian elephants used for comparison. That could indicate a large animal. But a single incomplete carpal cannot settle the question. Without collagen, ancient DNA and palaeoproteomic tests were not possible.
The researchers also ask why only one bone survived. It may be all that is left of an animal that died at the site, with the rest of its skeleton dispersed or destroyed. Or it may have been kept as a trophy or curiosity. The authors consider this second idea unlikely given the context.
They rule out a traded object, since a wrist bone has little value for craftwork. The collapsed wall above the bone protected it from later disturbance.
The authors note that the animal was not one of the elephants Hannibal led across the Alps. They suggest, though, that it could be the first known relic of the Punic Wars' elephants. Early modern European scholars searched for such a relic.
Sources
- Remains of a war elephant and catapult ammunition from the Second Punic War found in Córdoba, a unique discovery in Europe (La Brújula Verde)
- The Carthaginian Elephant in the Oppidum: New Archaeological Evidence of War Elephants in the Second Punic War (Arkeonews)
Paper: Rafael M. Martínez Sánchez, Agustín López Jiménez, Santiago Guillamón Dávila et al., The elephant in the oppidum. Preliminary analysis of a carpal bone from a Punic context at the archaeological site of Colina de los Quemados (Córdoba, Spain). Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Volume 69, February 2026, 105577. doi:10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105577
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