Where was the Battle of Munda fought? A topographic hypothesis from PNOA-3 LiDAR

he Battle of Munda (17 March 45 BCE) was Caesar's last and reportedly hardest engagement, decisively ending the Roman civil war. Its location, however, remains disputed: while the Renaissance tradition placed it at Montilla (Córdoba), nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship (Ortiz y Sanz, Corzo, Didierjean, Durán Recio, Ferreiro López) has progressively shifted the search toward the Osuna-Lantejuela corridor in modern Seville province. This preprint proposes a new candidate hill within that corridor — Cerro de la Quinta, approximately 7.9 Roman miles north of Urso (modern Osuna) — based on a literal reading of De Bello Hispaniensi combined with high-resolution PNOA-3 LiDAR data (5 pts/m², released for Andalucía in 2024). The proposed oppidum hill shows a defensive perimeter visible in SLR and VAT visualisations, with a slope discontinuity from ~5% to ~40% crossing modern parcel boundaries and a summit platform of approximately 36 ha. Roughly 5 Roman miles east, the Cerro de las Cabezas displays worked scarps, ~9.5 ha summit and ~170 ha of contiguous high ground with mutual line-of-sight to the proposed oppidum, consistent with the Caesarian camp in Bell. Hisp. 29. The classical candidate, Cerro de la Camorra, was examined with the same dataset and lacks defensive perimeter morphology and sufficient platform area; the well-known silver clasp inscribed "A VARO" found 800 m from it (Durán Recio & Ferreiro López 1985) is reinterpreted as consistent with Attius Varus's flight after the battle rather than with identification of the oppidum proper. The hypothesis is offered as a topographic working proposal for field verification, not as a confirmed identification.