I remember a description of a naval battle re-enacted in the Colosseum after they flooded it. Maybe 4th century or earlier. Best wishes!
Well keeping in mind that archaeology as a discipline didn’t even exist until the 15th century. And then of course a lot of that was “this is neat, we should take it”. The biggest shift you get with Napoleon was “we should try not to blow up the stuff we can’t take”. Which is cool.
The naval battles in the Coliseum were cool largely because they basically had to invent a bunch of water handling methods that we still use today to flood and drain the thing. But they also did non-naval battles. It was really just a logical progression. Having slaves kill each other (well, not actually that much killing, gladiator slaves were expensive, looking like they might kill each other while mostly not hurting each other was more common) had gotten boring. How do we spice that up? Tell a story. What story? Well we can put them in costumes and say they’re re-enacting this battle. Brilliant. And of course this tradition continued on with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. And is still happening today in various “old west” places like Tombstone just down the street from me. We do love us some hopefully safely re-enacted battles.