Call for Sources: Extant Scale and Lamellar with Fabric/Hide Intact

[Sean Manning]

Different kinds of hide product have very different survival rates, and hide scales are often rawhide whose survival rate is pretty near zero. So we have heavy, tanned leather calligae but not the ?tawed? leather straps which articulated iron manicae and lorica segmentata. Therefore I would not read the absence of evidence as evidence of absence, especially because Roman Army Studies scholars and reenactors often do the reverse and assume that all ancient armour looked like the iron, bronze, and brass kinds which they see in reports (my favourite example: the big brass needles in pewter or brass cases which medieval reenactors love, but also survive in the ground better than other solutions and are easy to spot in digs ... brass cases are the vast majority of the finds, but I doubt that they were in the vast majority of sewing baskets).

Since I wrote the call for sources in 2017, I have gained access to James' Dura book, and the published version will talk about it in more detail. I don't remember whether the rawhide-and-stick shields were from the collapsed tower like the horse trappers and the cuisses.

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Also, the scales and lamellar from Dura are a lot of catalogue entries, but I seem to recall that James thought most of them came from a very small number of armours which were in a fragile condition when found and were not well conserved (they are still decaying, I would like to see them as soon as possible but that costs money and CO2). So the long list of catalogue entries might just tell us about 2 or 3 armours.