Time and place for this shield boss?

[Sean Manning]

I'm not a specialist in barbarian Europe, but my understanding is that the long wooden shield with a spine down the middle which swells over the handhole into an umbo appears in the Iron Age. As iron and bronze become more affordable, better shields start to have a plate of bronze or iron over the wooden umbo to stop incoming weapons from piercing the wood and wounding the hand. As time passes, these plates are more and more intricately shaped rather than just being a trough hammered from a rectangle of iron or bronze. Sometime around the first century BCE or first century CE, actual round all-iron bosses appear. This correlates with the appearance of large, round shields in sites in Denmark although Roman imperial art continues to show barbarians with long oval or hexagonal shields. So to my limited and incomplete knowledge, there were no all-iron shield bosses in barbarian Europe at the same time as the Hjortspring deposits.

Could you point us to some information on the find from Glauberg which you are thinking of?

Edit: Back in 2008, Ruben P. thought that round iron shield bosses were first attested in barbarian Europe around 150 BCE. He tends to know his stuff but I would always recommend using an actual reference book or scholarly article rather than a web posting!