April Research Update

Amici et Amicae!

It's now May!  Although it sure seems like the last week of March has just stretched out to slowly consume the calendar.  Hopefully everyone is doing well.

For this month's post, first, a number of smaller updates on my research, and then I'm going to chat a bit about dating the spread of a given technology with archaeology, and one pitfall thereof.

Updates:

The writing process for article 2 (on the date and impact of the Roman adoption of mail armor) is moving along nicely, albeit a bit behind schedule.  I should have a 'feature complete' draft in the next couple of weeks or so.  I've asked a couple of colleagues if they would be willing to look that over and make suggestions before it goes into peer review, so that's probably how the article will spend most of May, making corrections and revisions based on their input.  At the end of that, I'll send it in to a journal to begin the peer review process.

My initial planned 'target' journal for this article is the Journal of Roman Studies (JRS), but the JRS is quite selective, so we will just have to see how that goes.  While it is not uncommon for an article that does not fit or pass peer review at one journal to be submitted later (often in a revised form) to another, almost every journal in the field does require that submissions only go through review one journal at a time; you can't submit the same article to multiple places in parallel.  So it is entirely possible that, should the JRS not be interested, the article will end up going into peer review somewhere else (or being substantially revised) at some later date.  One I get article-2 into peer review, it is full steam on the monograph (I'll talk about what that looks like in a future update), since peer review generally takes a few months at least, and there's no need to be idle.

Also, as my crowd-sourced research grant, I want to note that I've used some of the patreon funds for book acquisition.  I'll put a full list below, for the curious.  Some of these are books I have not read but have been recommended, while others are reference copies for books I am tired of having to continually renew from the university library.  Partly, this push to get my own copies of some of them was driven by the real concern that I might not have easy access to a university library soon (though this may be resolved, see below).  The April book purchase list (in no particular order):

J. Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West.

P. Erdkamp, The Graun Market in the Roman Empire: A Social, Political and Economic Study

A. Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War and the Rise of Rome

S. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

N. Taleb, The Black Swam (2nd ed.): The Impact of the Highly Improbable

B. Gibbons, The Destroying Angel: The Rifle-Musket as the First Modern Infantry Weapon

J.F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages from the Eighth Century

E. Hess, The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth

J. Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

Speaking of library access, one of the challenges of the current moment is that my current teaching position, like most adjunct positions, is temporary and ends in about a week.  Normally that would not be an outsized problem because there would be a load of other teaching positions advertising for new short-term adjunct positions to tide me over until I landed a permanent, tenure-track position.  But the academic job market - tenure-track and adjunct - is essentially frozen right now, both because social distancing closes off the standard interview process (which involves campus visits), but also because most universities are facing pretty severe budget cuts in the near future and are battening down the hatches in the meantime.  So there are no jobs and little prospect of getting a teaching contract renewed.

While we're financially stable-ish without the income (adjunct teaching pays terribly anyway) the loss of access to the library and other university resources would have been a serious impediment to research and blog-writing.  Fortunately, it looks like it will be possible for me to remain affiliated with my department after my teaching contract ends; nothing is certain yet, but it seems like we can make that work.  While that status wouldn't pay anything, it would keep me having access to things like the library (which right now is just the electronic resources, since the physical building is closed for COVID, but we may hope it will reopen in the near future - electronic-only research may be fine for many fields, but for history, it really isn't enough).  That, in turn, should be very good for you all and the blog, since it will allow me to keep drawing on those resources for both my research and public writing.

Talking Archaeology

Finally, I want to riff on one way we use archaeological evidence and how it can produce 'top-line' conclusions which can be deceptive to the lay-reader.

Article 2 (working title: "Mail Armor in the Middle Republic") starts by tracking, in as much as the evidence permits, the invention and spread of (chain)mail as an armor technology.  My goal in doing that is to nail down a date-range for when the technology might have arrived in Rome.  It's the sort of thing that, when presented to a popular audience, tends to get represented as a steadily spreading blob of color rolling over a map as a counter in the corner keeps fairly precise time, giving the sense that, for any given point on the map, you know, with a fair degree of certainty, if they do or don't have something in a given year.

Except, here's the quirk: unless a written source *tells* us, the adoption of a technology leaves no evidence that we can see.  Oh, sure, we may be able to detect objects associated with that technology in the archaeological records, but the chances that the 'first' mail shirt survives archaeologically are absolutely tiny (mail - especially in iron - is only *very* rarely preserved in the archaeological record) and we wouldn't know it if we had it.  The same goes for the first mail shirt worn by a Roman (the Roman term for mail armor is lorica hamata, literally "a cuirass of hooks").  And our first clear literary evidence for mail armor - the first written report of the stuff - is Polybius.  Writing in the mid-second century, *at least* (by his own testimony) 6-7 decades after mail armor was in common use by the Romans.  So we are pretty much out of luck on written sources.

So what evidence do we have, and what can it tell us?  We have archaeological evidence - we can *find* the object in question (in this case, 'concretions' - rusted together masses - of rings), or we have representational evidence - someone can draw the object.  And if you take all of those data-points, date them and put them on a map, the idea is you get something like a map of the spread of something.  And, to be fair, for object-types with high prevalence and survival rates (like pottery!) these maps can be very precise -down to the decade, in some cases.  Seriously, what archaeologists do with pots is incredible.

But that's not actually what you have.  Your data-points aren't arrival dates, they merely tell you that a given settlement had at least one of the object at a given date.  They don't tell you when they got it, how long they had it before someone dumped it into the ground, and so on.  The more recovered objects you have, the more precise things get (especially for depositions like ship-wrecks with little lag time - the amphora in a wrecked ship were new when they went down - which is part of why ceramics-specialists can date amphora with such precision).

But with mail, we're dealing with maybe a couple dozen deposits over two and a half centuries of spread.  And an object type that was never *very* common at all - mail was expensive, worn by the elite.  That's not to say we can't say anything: for the most part, our early finds are all in the greater Danube basin, suggesting an origin there in the fourth century.  They spread out from there, with finds in Britain in the mid-third century and in the Alps and France in the late third century.

(The technical term for these sorts of dates is 'terminus ante quem' which means "point before which."  Essentially, if we have dated armor rings from a site, we can't know if that was the first bit of mail there, or if mail had been used there for some time and the rest of it just isn't preserved.  So all we can say is, "At some point at or before this date, mail armor technology arrived here."  Thus, terminus ante quem.  The same goes for all sorts of uses for archaeology.

The opposite is a terminus post quem ("point after which") date.  A good example of that is using coins to date things - we can know the year a coin was minted, but not the year it was deposited.  So if we have a deposit that includes a coin minted in, say, 70 AD, that tells us that the deposit cannot be *older* than 70 AD, but it could have been deposited in January of 70, or sometime in 75, or in 175, so long as the coin remained in circulation.  Archaeologists *love* finding coins though, because they provide a firm terminus post quem date - a coin cannot be deposited *before* it was minted, and for Roman coins especially, we have firm and fairly reliable mint dates for almost every issue)

Two examples to see how this can trip up the unwary.  See, we are quite sure that mail comes out of the Danube Basin - but the earliest find isn't from there.  It's from Hjortspring, Denmark.  DENMARK.  No I am not kidding.  As best we can tell, a group of Central European warriors (raiders?  mercenaries?  unclear) rolled up the rivers and ended up in Denmark in the late-fourth/early-third century, probably got trashed by the locals and had their gear deposited (probably a ritual deposit) in a local water-feature, where some of the concretions of rings survive from at least one (and perhaps several) mail armors.  Fortunately, other bits-and-bobs from the deposit are also distinctively not from the region but speak to the central European origins of the assemblage, which helps us to understand what's going on (unless, of course, we have it completely wrong - finding a second site in Denmark with mid-fourth century mail would *completely* reset our understanding).

Or take the Romans.  The oldest dated Roman armor-ring find is from Lager III at Renieblas, the excavation of a set of Roman siege camps set around the ancient Celtiberian stronghold of Numantia, in Spain.  Lager III seems to have been occupied as part of Fulvius Nobilior's effort to take Numantia in 153 (without literary sources telling us that, we might date the camp anywhere from the 170s to the 130s; at least one of the archaeologists working on the site actually does want to re-date Lager III to the 170s, although I'm not yet convinced - it's based on coinage evidence, as I understand it, which hasn't been published yet.  Fascinating if it pans out).

(Aside: those are armor rings.  Excavations at Baecula, in Spain have also turned up a set of bronze hooks which are probably fasteners from a Roman lorica hamata, which would date to the battle there in 208.  But unlike armor-rings, which are (in a concretion, at least) pretty tell-tale evidence, these fasteners are just a lot less distinctive.  I think the archaeologists are *right*, but that evidence is a *thin* reed, because lots of things used bronze-hook-fasteners in the ancient world.)

So imagine that we used the same method for the Romans as for the Gauls - our expanding bubble of mail map would reach them c. 153, with the first concrete find (notwithstanding the otherwise ambiguous Baecula find - which is, as of yet, not fully published).  Except here's the thing - we have written evidence for the Romans.  Remember Polybius?  He gives a description of the Roman legion - including its armor - in his history.  As best we can tell, he is working from the (lost) accounts of Roman military tribunes - at points he notes that the legion he describes is different from how the Romans work in his own day.  He dates his model legion to 216, based on where he puts it in the narrative (and it seems likely to me that, in the original, there must have been a companion passage later which would have 'updated' parts of that description - but much of Polybius is lost, so we'll never know if there was such a passage).  And Polybius clearly notes that - again, in 216 - mail was already *required* for the 'first class' of Roman infantry (assume about a third of the heavy infantry, just to gloss over a *really* complicated issue that occupies 800 words plus 8 footnotes in my current draft).

That is to say, the lorica hamata was already common enough in Rome that its use was legally mandated for certain soldiers (who had to provide it at their own expense) and monitored by a public official (the military tribunes, not to be confused with the tribunes of the plebs) *63* years before the archaeological evidence shows up.  And, of course, it had to be adopted sometime before that (I suggest c. 225 as the likely date, but it could be much earlier.  Michael Taylor suggests a date between 275 and 264 - after the Pyrrhic Wars, before the First Punic War.  We may find out soon - the Aegates Island underwater archaeology teams - exploring a naval battle site from 241 - are using metal-detection equipment now.  Should they find some armor rings, that would shove the date back at least that far - and also probably do some pushing on our dates from mail in Gaul).

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that you want to be really careful when looking at evidence like this that you understand what the underlying evidence base is and what it really shows - and what we can only make informed assumptions about.