Coppicing trees for spear shafts and other tools

[Tarbicus]

The fact is you can't make properly functional spearshafts any other way than by coppicing. Lots of work has been done on prehistoric woodmanship in Britain, particularly on the tons of Bronze Age stuff from the Somerset Levels, where it is clear that they knew as much then as we do now about selection by type and form. The structure of a coppiced pole is so different from a dowel produced by machining a piece of lumber, because it employs both the xylem (inner) and phloem (outer) components of the wood and has all the structural benefits of being a tree in miniature. Thus there is no way that the Romans were not going to use coppicing to make spear shafts. There are certain 'givens' in woodmanship that are going to hold true throughout time, just as most Roman tools look like the modern ones.

http://www.romanarmy.com/rat/viewtopic. ... 847#101847

http://museums.ncl.ac.uk/archive/arma/w ... page08.htm