PETRONELL-CARNUNTUM, Austria — They lived in cells barely big enough to turn around in and usually fought until they died. This was the lot of those at a sensational scientific discovery announced Monday: The well-preserved ruins of a gladiator school in Austria.

The Carnuntum ruins are part of a city 28 miles east of Vienna that flourished about 1,700 years ago, a major military and trade outpost of the Roman empire.

The ruins of the gladiator school remain underground, and were mapped out by radar. Officials say the find rivals the famous Ludus Magnus –or “Great School,” the largest of the gladiatorial training grounds in Rome. And the Austrian site is even more detailed than the Roman ruin, down to the remains of a thick wooden post in the middle of the training area, a mock enemy that desperate gladiators hacked away at centuries ago.

It’s “a world sensation, in the true meaning of the word,” said Erwin Proell, an Austrian official.

Wolfgang Neubauer, director of the Ludwig Bolzman Institute for Archaeological Prospecting and Virtual Archaeology, said an unexplained “white spot” on an aerial photograph led experts to scan the area with state-of-the-art radar that shows a three-dimensional image of what lies underground.

It’s “a clarity we normally find only in the field of medicine,” he said on Monday.

The scientists have created images of the ruins underground shifting into what the complex must have looked like in the third century.

It was definitely a school of hard knocks.

“A gladiator school was a mixture of a barracks and a prison, kind of a high-security facility,” according to the Roemisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, one of the institutes involved in finding and evaluating the discovery. “The fighters were often convicted criminals, prisoners of war and usually slaves.”

Still, there were some perks for the men who sweated and bled for what they hoped would at least be a few brief moments of glory before their demise.

At the end of a dusty and bruising day, they could pamper their bodies in baths with hot, cold and lukewarm water. And hearty meals of meat, grains and cereals were plentiful for the men who burned thousands of calories in battle each day for the entertainment of others.

The complex contains about 40 tiny sleeping cells for the gladiators; a large bathing area; a training hall with heated floors and assorted administrative buildings. Outside the walls, radar scans show what archeologists believe was a cemetery for those killed during training.

The institute said the training area was where the men’s “market value and, in effect, their fate” was decided. At the same time, it gave them a small chance for survival, fame and possibly liberty.

“If they were successful, they had a chance to advance to ‘superstar’ status — and maybe even achieve freedom,” said Franz Humer, who oversees Carnuntum park.

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