Re: 1st century Auxiliary cavalry

[Crispvs]

I am not so sure that it is a matter of Connolly versus Junkelmann. I think it may be more a matter of evidence versus modern assumption.

As a general rule, we should always start with the archaeological and literary evidence and work outwards from there, adding informed assumption only where the archaeological evidence is lacking or ambiguous. We must then be prepared to change our assumptions when new evidence comes to light. For too often the reverse happens and people start off with assumptions about how things must have been based on their own experience and then try to make the archaeological evidence fit those assumptions. However, we are not Romans and we do not think like Romans. What might seem obvious or sensible to us may not have seemed obvious or sensible to the Romans.

When Connolly published his reconstruction of the saddle in 1988 he used the available archaeological evidence and extrapolated from that. We now know, following the Carlisle discoveries, that he was only partially right. The Carlisle saddles had been neither padded nor sewn under. Junkelmann's saddle also predates the Carlisle finds. I was told by Dan Peterson that Junkelmann had tried using Connolly saddles and had found them unsatisfactory. He had according removed the frames and found that they seemed to work better. However the horns, I was told, tended to pull in and hug the rider on the resultant 'pad' saddle.
Now, I acknowledge that Junkelmann has a great deal of experience of working with horses and certainly has a very good understanding of Roman cavalry, but the pad saddle does not seem to fit easily with the evidence we now have to draw on

We can see that the Carlisle covers are the same as the Valkenburg cover but more complete so any reconstructions based on the Valkenburg cover must be revised in the light of the newer evidence. We can also see the clear evidence on the Carlisle covers of frames, which seem to bear out Connolly's reconstruction of the saddle tree, if not his reconstruction of the saddle itself. Added to that we have the sculptural evidence of a number of stelae which show saddles with horns. These horns to not seem to be depicted pulling in to hug the rider as I am told happens with the pad saddle reconstruction. The sculptures also often appear to show the flaps which were found still attached to the Carlisle covers.

The flaps on the Carlisle covers show that the saddle covers could not have been sewn under, which surely is an essential requirement for a pad saddle. They also show clearly from the well defined stretch patterns on them that the saddles they came from had little or no padding, which is supported by Fronto's criticism of cavalry who put straw in their saddles to provide padding.

Therefore, it seems that the pad saddle, for all Dr Junkelmann's experience of riding, is not in accordance with what the current state of the evidence is telling us.
What we have here then, is a clash between reconstructions based on the evidence and reconstructions based on modern assumptions.

A truly scientific approach would be to take what the evidence shows us and try different ways of reconstructing it according to the evidence and using them to find out what part of the possible range is workable and what is not, before resorting to putting modern assumption before the evidence.

The Romans must have known what they were doing. Just because we still do not fully understand what they were doing it does not mean that we should throw out what we know of their practice because it does not seem to fit with our own limited experience.


Incidentally, on controlling the horse, when I was learning to ride I was taught to control the horse mainly with my feet and to exert only minimal control with the reins. I am not sure that I ever felt the horse directly through a modern saddle but I certainly felt his movements with my feet and after a while was able to both respond to the horse and control him almost entirely with my feet. Food for thought?


Crispvs