More glue - bah

[Paullus Scipio]

Matt wrote:

Iron was certainly available, and yet helmets and (metallic) armor in the Greek Classical era were overwhelmingly bronze. Even the Romans were making helmets and armor (scale, e.g.) from copper alloys well into the 3rd century AD, though iron was quite common for those items. Chalk it up to fashion, I'd say!

...perhaps not just fashion. Iron helmets had been tried very early in the iron age in the Middle east, but we rarities, no doubt due to the difficulties of working it, which in turn would have made them very expensive, so they never caught on.

It was left to those great and innovative iron workers, the Celts, to perfect ways of making practical iron helmets, and it is after long contact with Celts and the conquest of Gaul that Rome finally took them up, though without entirely replacing the age-old bronze for several centuries......