Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Snapshots of history


Roman slingshot, I placed my hand in the shot to give a sense of scale. After seeing them in books, I thought they would be larger than they were.
A suit of Roman chain mail remains frozen in time as It was left thousands of years ago.
For all those painting Celts at the moment, here is a reconstruction of Celtic Cloth.

4 comments:

Andrew said...

Thanks for the museum photos. I saw some very interesting sling shot in a Journal of Roman Military Equipment (I forget which issue). Having run out of their lead shot, the Roman defenders of a camp pushed their fingers into the wet sand to make a quick mould. They poured lead into the hole, and were left with fingertip-shaped ammunition!

Anonymous said...

That's a famous story from the defense of the Roman fort at Velsen (NL) during the Frisian revolt of 28AD. The attack has been reconstructed by tracing the deteriorating quality of the slingshot. Then they get rougher until they end up as Andrew says, fingertip-shaped.

Secundus said...

I have posted a clearer photo for you Andrew, as the one with my hand in was a little blurry (I was under fire again at the time).

BigRedBat said...

I'd not appreciated how small sling bullets can be!