The Abandonment of the Gladius for the Spatha - Why?

[Tarbicus]

If we accept Lendon's idea that legionaries were increasingly reserved for engineering and besieging while auxilliaries bore the brunt of battle, then we're not really seeing a replacement of the gladius by the spatha, or at the very least not in the timeframe we've been discussing. The same goes for the "replacement" of pilum by hasta discussed in another thread. In this case, hasta and spatha would be the preferred weapons for infantry combat from the 1st c. CE onwards.

I agree with Danno, and I'm chuffed that someone else has come to the same conclusion.

Average skeletal remains of Romans seems to be 5'5", and of Celts 5'10" (Matt Amt's post here: [url:kmduj91r]http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=5409[/url]. If you look through the thread one says he saw an interview with an Italian archaeologist who had studied skeletal remains all over Europe, and puts the average Roman height at 5'2"!