All right welcome everybody thank you
all for coming out on this blustery
Friday afternoon to hear what I know is
going to be a wonderful informative and
entertaining talk about classical Kevlar
by our guest professor Gregory Aldrete
I'm going to give a short introduction
as I can to someone with as many
accomplishments as professor already has
add he is Frankenthal professor of
history and humanistic studies at the
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and
that is where he has for several years
now directed the UWGB line o thorax
project this is a line o thorax by the
way and what their project is has been
making it the project has involved
students it actually originated with a
student coming forward has involved
students faculty and at times even the
Green Bay Police Department in terms of
ballistic testing which is not something
historians of antiquity usually get
involved in professor al Qaeda is a
graduate of Princeton and he has a PhD
in ancient history from the University
of Michigan he's the author or co-author
of numerous books, gestures and
exclamations in ancient Rome, floods of
the Tiber in ancient Rome and his most
recent one the long shadow of antiquity
what have the Greeks and Romans done for
us and reconstructing ancient linen body
armor unraveling the line of thorax
mystery several of these are available
for perusal and sale up here he's
received numerous fellowships for his
research including a National Endowment
for the Humanities fellowships two times
and also a soulsand fellowship at the
University of wisconsin-madison he's
also received numerous teaching awards
as teaching Awards on a CV outnumber his
research Awards as a matter of fact
showing what what an interesting
conveyor of information he is the most
prestigious I suppose in the most recent
2012 Wisconsin professor of the year
from the Carnegie Foundation the council
for advancement and support of Education
he's given talks about Lino thorax and
reconstructing this ancient armor in
numerous venues and has been featured on
several TV shows including museum
secrets Galileo and Eve
Penn & Teller tell a lie we are
extremely grateful to Professor al redy
for being here we're also extremely
grateful for all the sponsors of this
talk from across the campus classical
studies programme in classical club
history department in history Club
International Studies program materials
science and engineering military science
sociology world languages and cultures
the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
and of course the Committee on lectures
with it's funding from this government
of the student body thanks all of them
and let's give a warm round of applause
for our guest professor Aldrete
[audience applauds]
all right thanks very much Mike and I
welcome to everybody today thank you for
coming this afternoon and what I do want
to talk to you about is this project
that I've been working on primarily with
my undergraduate students for about the
last six or seven years and it has been
to reconstruct this somewhat mysterious
type of armor that was used not just by
the Greeks but all kinds of ancient
peoples make a bunch of examples we've
ultimately made I think seven full-scale
suits of this armor and then we
subjected it to scientific testing to
see how how effective it would have been
as protection so that's what I want to
talk about today is this project I'm
gonna begin with just a little sort of
referencing some of the people who use
this in antiquity the most famous of
whom certainly was Alexander the Great
he was the great Conqueror from Macedon
who conquered most of the then known
world and there even though he's so
famous even though he's one of the most
successful generals of all time has one
of the most successful armies of all
time there's still a lot of mysteries
surrounding the equipment that his men
used but it does look like that he
himself at times and many of his
soldiers some of their standard
equipment was this peculiar type of
armor made probably out of linen and
glue now when you think of ancient armor
or ancient Greek armor or ancient armor
used by the Greeks of the Macedonians
what tends to come to mind - stuff like
this bronze armor and this has been the
focus of most scholarly studies of
ancient military equipment and the
reason for this is pretty simple
bronze armor is what is survived so
scholars like to study what they can
touch what they can make typology zuv
and we have lots of bronze armor but we
don't have surviving any of this linen
armor line of thorax is the apparently
ancient term for this stuff and it
literally means sort of a linen torso or
thorax is actually the standard Greek
term for any kind of body armor so this
would literally be a linen body armor as
I said it has been somewhat ignored in
scholarship up to now for the somewhat
pragmatic reason that no examples of
this stuff
five until today and this has been one
reason that I think the line of thorax
has been relatively neglected the second
reason that I think it hasn't gotten as
much credit or attention as maybe it
deserves is that there's just a lot of
skepticism about whether armor made out
of cloth could have really offered some
kind of viable protection and if you
look at a lot of the comments that
people have written about a linen armor
or the line of thorax they'll often try
to dismiss it or say well it must have
been second-class armor that you would
only wear this if you were really
desperate or surely it was covered
completely with metal scales or it was
really had a leather core or a metal
core or there's been a lot of all kinds
of theories so a lot of attempts to try
and dismiss this and we were curious is
that skepticism warranted was this
really not such great armor as everybody
sort of suggests or maybe did the
ancient people know something and that's
why it was used so widely that's where
we came in this is the University of
wisconsin-green Bay line a thorax
project this is actually the initial
group of students that I started out
working on this with so it started out
as a fairly small project and really
grew until it involved a number of other
faculty hundreds of students literally
and a wide range of people from the
community which is kind of nice
we ended up drawing on the expertise of
people like a group of women who were
local traditional weavers we ended up
getting a bunch of local deer of bow
hunters to serve as our expert archers
so we actually ended up calling on all
kinds of different people with different
skills to to help us out in this like I
say we've reconstructed a number of
full-scale examples of this and that was
really the first stage of the project to
just sort of build these things now talk
about the sources that we had to draw on
when we were doing this but here you can
see four different examples get a sense
of a little bit of the variety that
these these had I should give credit
where credit is due this project
actually did not originate with me Mike
alluded to this it started with one of
my undergraduate students a guy named
Scott Bartel and he had basically been
in a couple of
my classes he became extremely
infatuated with Alexander the Great was
pretty obsessed with Alexander got
alexander tattoos all kinds of things
but in the end one summer he decided to
try and make for himself in his basement
this suit of armor that Alexander's
depicted wearing and in a famous mosaic
I'll show you pictures that mosaic later
and so he made this thing just down with
modern materials and then brought it to
me and said you know professor Aldrete I
made this can you tell me if it's
accurate or how I might work make it
better and so I said sure I'll give you
some references being a good teacher
well I went and looked at the
scholarship and there turned out not to
be any good references and at this point
I said aha research idea let's do this
so then we started working on it and
really doing the research and figuring
out and ultimately this led into the
whole project as I said did ultimately
involve a lot of my students doing all
sorts of things okay
so let's talk first about these sources
so how do we know about this armor and
there's basically two main types of
sources we have to draw on one is
references in ancient literature by
ancient authors and the other is visual
sources in terms of literary references
the word line of thorax shows up quite
early in Greek history it's actually in
Homer it appears twice in Homer's Iliad
so even if sort of the very beginning of
Greek literature we have some references
to this sort of armor beyond that we
spend a lot of time scouring various
databases looking up inscriptions
looking at all kinds of things and
ultimately we found 65 explicit literary
references to linen armor by some forty
different ancient authors and this
includes both mentions of the line of
thorax itself as well as instances when
they would say things like a thorax a
suit of armor made out of linen and
these include a lot of famous authors so
includes people like Herodotus Xenafawn
[inaudible] Aeneas Plutarch Pliny the Elder
Cornelius Nepos Livy
Suetonius Cassius
as well as a number of more obscure ones
so this is something that is quite well
attested in ancient sources across a
wide geographic chronological and
cultural range one of the really
remarkable things about these references
tool in an armor is just how diverse the
different peoples who are said as having
used this armor work so it wasn't
something that was just a Greek thing or
a Macedonian thing it really seems to
have been just a general technology that
people in the ancient world employed
across a fairly wide span of time and
just to sort of give you a glimpse of
some of the different civilizations some
of the more famous ones that are
explicitly attested is having used linen
armor it includes the Egyptians the
Persians the Phoenicians the Macedonians
the Greeks the Romans the Etruscans and
various tribes in Spain so even this
small sample you can see pretty much
spans the entire Mediterranean Basin and
those civilizations themselves cover at
least several hundred maybe half a
millennia and in a lot of different
regions Armour of course linen I should
say is made from the flax plant and the
flax plant also has a very wide
geographic range linen was available to
all these civilizations we have a number
of descriptions of how to grow linen
from authors like Pliny the Elder he
stresses its ease of growing that it's
adaptable to unpromising agricultural
environments that you can grow it in
certain places where you can't really
grow other crops
it grows decently at high altitudes and
there are a number of regions that were
famous for producing high-quality linen
such as Egypt but the other areas also
grew linen so there's certain places
that are very famous for very nice linen
but you could grow other types of linen
or just linen a basic linen all around
the Metron yin and even up far north
away from met rhenium there's ancient
acetate as to taste that ancient
accounts of growing linen in places like
German
so all sorts of people had it linen
there's fines of linen from Anatolia and
Syria dating back to at least 7,000 BC
Asia Minor was another place that was
known to have produced lots of linen and
we know that linen was used in Greece at
least by Mycenaean times so maybe around
1500 BC linen is a very versatile fabric
also so you can use it not just for
clothing but for all kinds of things and
some of the uses that we know the Greeks
used linen for include awnings Nets
packaging sails tents paintings bandages
all kinds of things and women can be
somewhat time consuming to process but
it also has certain qualities which make
it a very attractive fabric it dries
very quickly it's breathable it has a
high tensile strength it has a low
elasticity it has very good durability
and it actually gets stronger when you
get it wet so all of these are nice
qualities of linen our second type of
source material that we had to draw on
and maybe one of the most important ones
was visual depictions of this kind of
armor on vases wall paintings and in
sculpture and the line authorities been
identified with a type of armor that
scholars refer to as type 4 so this just
refers to its shape it's sort of form
but this is sort of the technical
typology and we spent quite a long time
scouring all sorts of visual databases
those you familiar with doing research
in ancient history might know the corpus
of a saw romantic Wharram it's this
giant sort of 250 volume publication
that shows pictures of all the vases
that people have found we flipped
through that thing page by page which
was real fun we also searched online
databases museum catalogues art
catalogues all kinds of things and in
the end we put together a database of
images of this sort of armor and what we
ultimately found was 910 total images
off 486 objects most of which date from
about
600 BC to the first century BC just to
kind of break this down a little more
detail we had 96 images from black
figure style vases we had 12 from white
ground technique vases we had 464 from
red figure vases and this was our single
largest category it was just about half
of our total number of visual images but
we also had 166 from various stone and
terracotta sculptures some of these
reliefs some of these three-dimensional
sculpture we had 27 paintings which were
useful for the fact that they preserve
some of the colors that apparently these
things originally were and these
paintings are on things like in tombs on
sarcophagi we also had 158 images in
bronze and these were either inscribed
upon bronze objects like this plates
vases bowls or were actual bronze
statues by far the most famous of all
images is this one this is the Alexander
mosaic which shows Alexander the Great
wearing apparently this linen armor and
there is a literary source that
specifically says that at one battle in
particular
Alexander wore a line of thorax some
armor made out of linen and this by the
one by the way is the one that my
students Scott I was inspired by so this
is a very famous mosaic it's in Naples
now in the museum in Naples it was
originally at Pompeii all right so
taking the literary sources and the
visual images what we did is try to kind
of backwards engineer from them and come
up with a pattern that when you put it
together right would look like the
images we were seeing and this is the
first pattern we came up with and you
can see it has two basic pieces you have
this bottom piece which wraps around the
body around the torso and then you have
a shoulder piece that goes over the
shoulder with those two long arms one on
each side of the head these would have
been attached together like this and the
way they were worn is you would have
taken it and taken that flat torso piece
and bent it into a circular tubular
shape
around your body and what are the really
great things we had to work with is
there's about 30 images of Greek
warriors actually putting this armor on
and so this showed us that they did in
fact have it start out flat and then
bend it into this circular tubular shape
so these were very helpful once you'd
bent that piece around you would tie the
two ends together usually with some
leather cords and notice how the
shoulder flaps stick straight up behind
him so before you actually grab them and
sort of tug them down across the chest
they clearly stand upright you would
then tie these off the to shoulder flaps
bend them forward again tie them across
your chest and there you would have your
armor other distinctive parts of this
armor were the flaps and these provide
somewhat optimistically some protection
to your upper thighs and groin these are
called Tarrou gaze and that's the basic
parts of this armor now in looking at
the images one of the most one of the
things that jumped out at us the most
was how whatever material this thing was
made out of had two somewhat
contradictory properties on the one hand
it was rigid enough that when you just
leave those shoulder flaps alone they
would stand rigidly upright but on the
other hand whatever this was made of was
flexible enough that you could then bend
them down into a c-shape tie them off
across your chest and in the same way
the torso section starts out flat it was
rigid enough to hold that shape to kind
of stand upright we have vases where you
can see it just holding itself upright
but it was also flexible enough that you
could bend it and that combination of
rigidity and flexibility is is really a
somewhat weird one it's it's hard to
find materials that replicate that this
means it probably can't be metal unless
it was very very thin metal it probably
isn't just cloth on its own it's
probably not leather unless the leather
was treated in various ways
so this is one of the things that was it
was a puzzle because you have to find
something that would account for those
qualities
working from the images we ended up
making some patterns and at this stage
it was a lot of trial and error so we
cut out a lot of little cardboard suits
of armor tried them on held up a vase
painting said does it look like this and
we kept playing around with it until we
finally got patterns that we thought
were approximating what we were seeing
in the art we then converted that into
an actual formal pattern with
measurements and all that this is our
first one we also have a later one
that's a bit more simplified but our
first one is kind of complex and one of
the things we noticed when we made this
pattern was that each of these somewhat
random looking little twists or turns or
curves or tabs
they don't seem important but when you
assemble it his armor we found that all
of these things serve very important
functions so some of these curves at the
bottom they're not just decorative
they are end up aligning over your hips
so that you can bend sideways when
you're wearing this or
to give you another example this little
tab right there I mean it looks like it
might just be a random tab but when you
assemble this whole thing what that ends
up being is it's a neck guard so it's a
very practical and useful thing that
protects the back of your neck from a
sweeping blow with a sword or something
else that might chop your head off so
all of these little bits of the pattern
that might look somewhat random are
decorative we found were very practical
almost all of them had some pragmatic
reason for being there the biggest
problem I think that we faced was trying
to find materials that at least
approximated the sort of materials that
would have been available in the ancient
world so we wanted to build our armor
particularly the ones that we subjected
to tests out of things that were
historically plausible or as close to
authentic as we could and the biggest
challenge here was linen how do you get
your hands on linen that is hand-spun
hand-woven and that has the qualities of
ancient linen and here just as an aside
let me caution you there's lots of sites
on the internet that say that they're
selling hand-spun hand-woven linen
they're lying
we ended up testing a lot of this a lot
of them end up being machine processed a
linen particularly a machine spun into
threads and then maybe somebody weaves
it by hand so only that final step is
really done authentically in the end
after a lot of searching we actually
made contact with a group of women in
Wisconsin our home state of all places
who had grown their own flax processed
it by traditional methods spun this into
thread and woven it into fabric and so
we ended up at obtaining our initial a
batch of linen from them that's what we
used for a lot of our tests the problem
with that is it's horrific ly expensive
because of all the labor so it's about a
hundred dollars per square yard and so
we ended up using that for our test
patches but for some of our full-scale
reconstructions we cheated and use some
more modern linen or linen they've been
partially machine processed but for
those we were really testing issues of
fit and dimensions and stuff like that
so it didn't matter as much the
authenticity of the linen but for the
penetration testing we did use the fully
authentic linen in the last couple years
that this whole thing of serv
experimental archaeology my university
really took off and a couple other
professors actually started growing
linen on campus and processing and
according to traditional methods so now
basically we make our own and just to
show you a couple of phases of this with
linen or the flax plant you have to
plant it you harvest it you read it
which means you put it in these big
ponds and let it soak and it kind of
rots and smells horrific ly bad and then
you dry that and you end up with stuff
that looks a lot like straw you then
take that straw and you break it in this
sort of machine it's a wooden thing that
you snap down and shatter the straw and
then you can pull out the long sort of
tendrils that are inside there that's
done a process called sketching where
you smack it with this wooden board
against another and you can see you end
up with something that looks an awful
lot like human hair it has the same kind
of feel and texture you then hackle that
which is the hazardous part you need
tetanus shots to do this
because you have to pull it through
these big upright iron nails and you get
out all the impurities and then you spin
it into thread and we actually taught a
number of our students how to use a drop
spindle which is this ancient form of
technology that they would use to spin
thread you then weave it together and
you end up with linen so now we can
actually lay our hands on lots of linen
that is reasonably historically
authentic gluing so how do we actually
put this thing together
well the manufacture process starts out
with taking a layer of linen putting it
on the ground and then saturating it
with glue and we use a lot of glue here
so we really want to soak a layer with
glue you then stick a second layer down
on top of that and sort of press them
together and then you let them dry and
it's important we found to let the two
layers dry completely and that takes at
least ten to fourteen hours depending on
humidity when we tried to cheat and
build up a bunch of layers quickly at
one time we found that our armoured room
mold and was very unpleasant so that
didn't work very well in terms of glues
what we really would have liked to use
was what we think the ancients used and
the ancients had all kinds of glues that
were equivalent of superglue I mean they
had really strong bonds they were
waterproof we know these things existed
because we found for example there was a
helmet fished out of a river in Germany
that had two pieces of metal joined
together by an ancient glue that was
still bound together after 2,000 years
at the bottom of the river
so they have this really nice glue but
none of those recipes have survived in a
way that we're able to replicate them so
what we ended up doing was serve going
the opposite tack and saying well we'll
use some glues that we know would have
existed very widely in the ancient world
that would have been very cheap and
readily available almost to everyone so
we ended up focusing on a couple kinds
of glues including one made from flax
seeds and another one made from rabbits
here we are using rabbit glue and we
actually end up using radically the most
and you can see there's the little
boiler there a double boiler we would
actually apply it with a turkey baster
and you can see a saturating the test
patch here so you guess sends how much
glue we would use and I can't say here
we didn't actually have to kill a bunch
of rabbits
fortunately rabbit glue is still used by
many traditional oil artists or oil
painters to prime their canvas and so
you can just order a nice powdered
rabbit glue from art supply stores but
it's it's its traditional rabbit glue
it's what they would have had in the
ancient world too we also made a glue
made that was from flax seeds so we
could say that anywhere that you could
have grown linen you also would have had
access to a glue and this was a little
bit weaker bond but it was good enough
it would have worked so these glues were
cheap they were widely available by
using these glues it was a least common
denominator kind of thing we could say
well this you could have made it out of
probably they made it out of better glue
but it still works with these we then
build up the layers of laminated linen
until you have a nice thick slab and
there is evidence from the ancient world
of this sort of lamination technology so
there have been fines from places like
Mycenae another from in northern Italy
where they found little fragments of
multiple layers of linen that have been
glued together and these may actually be
bits of a line of thorax the problem is
they're just little pieces so you can't
positively say this is what it came from
but they were found among grave goods
among other weapons helmet swords stuff
like that that does lead some credence
to that interpretation but we can say
that the ancient Greeks used this sort
of lamination technology for what looks
like military applications we also know
that the ancient Greeks used laminated
linen layers of limited land for other
things for example professor Amy Cohen
has done some research on Greek theater
masks and she's proven that probably
many of the masks that were used in
Greek theater were made from built up
from layers of laminated linen so this
is something a sort of technology they
may have applied in in all kinds of
you end up with a nice big slab this one
here was the very first one we did it's
17 layers thick
we then trace the patterns onto them and
cut them out and I say cut them out very
flippantly but when we actually tried to
cut that laminated slab it was almost
impossible
I mean first we tried some really big
scissors that didn't work I eventually
went to Home Depot and bought some bolt
cutters and tried to cut it that didn't
work
finally we were only able to cut this
thing using an electric jigsaw equipped
with blades that were made to cut
through quarter-inch steel plates now in
the ancient world they didn't have
electric jig saws with steel cutting
blades and so this led us to the rather
obvious conclusion that this was not how
they made them in antiquity and from
then on we figured out that what they
did brilliant was to first cut out each
shape and then glue them together so
that this is the wonders of experimental
archaeology you learn these important
insights but I mean seriously it is by
doing this kind of thing that you do
realize things that should have been
maybe obvious so from then on for our
subsequent ones first we cut the
patterns to shape then glued them
together and no doubt that's how they
did this in antiquity you then attach
the two main pieces together we use
metal bolts sometimes you could also use
glue you could also use ties all sorts
of things you attach some Tarrou gaze on
the bottom do some painting add some
nice details and you end up with your
finished product and this one here is
actually one of the very first complete
ones you made it's the same one I have
here and this particular one has 17
layers they're about one centimeter
thick it consumed a bolt of linen that
was 53 feet long and three feet wide and
two gallons of glue so again that gives
you some sense how much glue went into
this you really want to saturate that
and sort of transform the linen into
this composite slab that has qualities
all of its own here's some slides of me
trying this on and I give you a vase
painting to the side for the comparison
notice how the the flap sort of stands
up on its own
before you tie it down here's another
one wear it I'm wearing it and a famous
this is the Achilles vase it's this
famous vase of Achilles the Greek
warrior wearing one of these things I
and some of my students have worn them
for long periods of time up to eight or
nine hours by students at least have run
around very vigorously in them done all
sorts of exercise we've been caught in
rain storms in them we have a good sense
from trying these out what their
wearability characteristics were and
I'll come back to some of those
characteristics at the end of the talk
oh and are now ready for battle sort of
shot here so okay one of the neat side
things that came out of this was we
found that really for one of the first
times we had amassed a big database of
images of this type of armor and so for
the very first time could really
scientifically analyze it and say how
common certain forms of decoration were
on Greek armor and what the actual the
forms that these things took and were
there variations in it so in movies and
stuff you'll often see Greek soldiers
per portrayed they'll have somewhat
random decorations they'll maybe imitate
a Greek pot but we had no sense of how
common these specific decorations were
and just give you a sense of some of the
stuff that came out of this analysis one
sort of surprising thing was that in
many discussions of the line of Thor
arcs of ancient vikarma they'll say well
they would have added scales of metal or
horn or hide or leather for extra
protection and this was the standard way
they were made well when we actually
analyzed the images we found that those
sorts of scales were only added in about
15% of cases so rather than being the
standard they're actually the exception
they're quite unusual and most of them
were just the plain linen without any
added protection in terms of the form we
found that about 60% of them had the
curved shoulder flaps 40% square but
more interestingly there was a
chronological pattern to this that it
looks like the square shoulder flaps
were predominant before 500 BC and the
rounded were then more popular after
that date so for whatever reason there
was a
shift in style here same thing with the
true gays those little flaps we found
that the a double layer of them was much
more common before about 475
but after 475 they seemed to just use
one layer of these so this was all kind
of useful for understanding ancient
armor a little bit better in terms of
decoration I'm sorry in terms of tying
it off the single point to which you had
tie both arms that go around the
shoulders was the most common thing
about 50% of them 35% had this sort of
dual parallel where there were two
attachment points one cord going to each
one and 15 had the really fancy
crossover effect where they would have
two points but crossover the ties in
terms of decoration the most common
decoration that we found on these was a
star or kind of sunburst pattern and
this was on about 17% of them the stars
would have between 4 and 16 rays usually
so if you're building yourself some
greek armor you want to be authentic to
stick a star on it some things we
thought expected would be very common
turned out not to be so the famous Greek
key pattern which you can see on this
guy's belt and actually because we
thought it would be so common we put it
on our first one is on the belt of this
one that turned out to be very rare it
only showed up in about 4% so there was
stuff that we expected would happen
which really did it there were also 42
images of warriors on horseback wearing
this so again this seems to have been
used not just by infantry but by cavalry
there's also references to Marines on
board ships using the sort of armor all
right so we had built some plausible
examples we had run around in them we
had tested them we had shown that this
was we were able to reconstruct this
kind of armor the next stage of our
project the second stage was to test it
and see how good protection did this
really offer and we did this by
constructing a number of roughly 2x2
foot square test patches and we made
different patches in different ways to
experiment with different variable
so we had different numbers of layers we
would alternate the direction of the
weave of the fabric we would use
different glues we would use different
quality linens some that had very thin
threads some that had very thick their
threads some that had high density of
threads some low density of threads all
kinds of variables we subjected these
mostly to test by shooting them with
arrows and the reason we selected to do
arrows was because this would have been
one of those common battlefield hazards
that you have needed protection from
arrows coming in and hitting you and
also it was a form of testing that we
could control every variable so that we
could make this scientifically valid our
methodology was to mount the test
patches onto a foam block which would
simulate a human torso in sort of
density and resistance and then secure
this to a heavy wooden frame we used
arrows that were hand made arrows with
natural fletching we got arrowheads that
were again hand cast out of iron and
bronze in the shapes and weights and
types of metals as good as best we could
that approximated ancient arrowheads
here are some of the serve art of
replicas the we also use some modern
arrowheads just for fun for comparison
including some of the sort of carbon
steel razor-sharp hunting arrows and
here's some of our replica ones this is
for them our later ones that were a
little bit better you could see the
scale here and to just sort of reassure
that these really are like ancient
arrows in this slide on the on the left
is one of our replica arrowheads and on
the right is a photograph of an actual
Arrowhead in the National Museum in
Athens that was found on the
battlefields and was either used by
Greeks or Persians so you can see in
terms of the size the shape of the basic
characteristics we had some pretty good
approximations of ancient arrowheads
when it came to the bows though we used
modern compound bows that use a system
of pulleys and steel wires to achieve a
specific hold weight and the reason we
didn't use ancient or replica bows is
because we needed each shot
have exactly the same force applied to
it and if you use bows made out of
natural materials factors like humidity
will affect the force that each shot has
each shot will have a different power to
it also with bows that you just pull
back you know the further back you pull
the more force but if you have different
people shooting it they have a different
pull length whereas these have that
specific hold weight we could measure it
exactly and we ended up doing most of
our tests with bows that had 25 pound 45
pound and 65 pound pull weights and we
think this approximated the strength of
most of the bows that were used in the
period were interested in we also course
played around with anything we had
including I have a longbow replica
longbow so we did play around with other
stuff we shot from a whole bunch of
different ranges from fairly close range
to rather long shots and even longer
than this for each shot we measured the
penetration we marked each shot numbered
them individually recorded all the data
related to that shot and then we
analyzed the test results and we
generated lots and lots of data but the
bottom line conclusion is that if you
were wearing one of these things that
was about one centimeter thick you would
have been protected from any sort of
arrow that you were likely to encounter
in the a period were interested in so
from about 600 BC down to about 300 or
200 BC so this would have been quite
good protection we settled by the way on
about 10 to 12 millimeters in thickness
because that's the maximum thickness you
can make these and still be able to bend
them very sharply more or less
indefinitely so we've had our longest
ones for seven years we've bent them
over and over again from flat to curved
and they've stayed intact if you make
them thicker than this they start to
crack or delaminate when you bend them
over and over again so it seems there's
a practical thickness that you can make
these laminated slabs of about 12
millimeters just to give you a sense how
much difference it makes when we shot
our foam target without a test patch on
it with a very weak 25-pound bow
25 feet away it penetrated 230
millimeters when we stuck the armor on
it went less than 5 millimeters in and
that's basically the difference between
a fatal shot by an arrow and not being
hurt at all very late in our process we
had some documentaries filmed about us
including by the Discovery Channel and
they have lots more money than us so
they could afford to actually bring a
very expensive ballistics-gel torso and
we got to play with this which was great
fun so we actually were able to sort of
confirm that our you know $25 foam
target block actually had about the same
properties as the fancy ballistics-gel
torso which emulated a human torso so
not only was this sort of nice to play
around with but it also confirmed our
data using a little bit better materials
and like I say about ten millimeter
linen armor was the difference between
here you can see the arrow plunging
quite deep with no armor on and no
injury at all to the person wearing it
we did lots of number crunching with our
data repeated every shot multiple times
things like this and again one of our
basic conclusions if you want this
express just slightly more scientific
way is that took about 70 joules of
energy to penetrate a 10 millimeter
thick laminated slab so again this was
our kind of baseline measure measuring
stick for success some of the things
that we also tested were the effect of
lofting shots so a lot of our tests were
just flatlined trajectory where you
shoot an arrow at a fairly short range
but on ancient battlefields in reality a
lot of these arrows would have been shot
up in the air by masses of archers and
big blocks and just been falling down on
the enemy so they weren't really aim
shots there were these kind of massed
volleys so we did some of these and when
we did that quite honestly the arrow is
just pretty much bounced off or stuck
very weakly in the armor so not only
would they have protected you from just
a point-blank straight on shot but
against this more realistic sort of just
falling arrows it would have been very
good protection we also shot arrows at
different angles so most of our testing
was just sort of a worst-case scenario
an arrow hitting at exactly
perpendicular to the armor so all the
force was transferred to the armor but
again in reality most of the surfaces
were curved arrows who have been coming
in at angles and when we did some
experience that we found an unexpected
bonus to this kind of armor because what
would happen is if an arrow came in
let's say at a 45-degree angle
the tip would penetrate the first couple
layers of fabric and then it was almost
as if the subsequent layers would sort
of grab that tip and start to turn it so
that the arrow would start going
burrowing between two layers rather than
continuing straight in and so what it's
effectively doing is diverting the force
of the arrow away from your body
and so angled shots were even less
effective at penetrating there were a
lot of variables we expected to make a
big difference which turned out not to
matter so much one of these was
alternating the direction of weave using
very fine linen versus corsola and none
of that mattered nearly so much as
simply the total thickness of the
laminated slab so basically it seems
like when you laminate this stuff
together it takes on new properties that
the individual layers might not have or
might not be characteristic if you're
just looking at one layer of fabric
um the glues didn't matter much so
whether we used rabbit glue or we use
modern PVC glues we used Elmer's glue
for some we used all kinds of glues we
used some fancy glues those didn't make
a great deal of difference either again
what mattered much more was the overall
thickness of the slab what did matter
was the authentic linen versus modern
machine processed linen and there was
about a 10 to 15 percent difference in
terms of greater resistance that the
ancient linen offered then exactly the
same sort of slab of modern linen and
after a lot of serve playing around this
what we found out or figured out was
that in linen naturally has these waxy
kind of pectin as' coating over the
fibers and when you process these
according to traditional methods some of
that waxy coating stays on it even when
you weave it into fabric and so it gives
the final slab a little bit of a kind of
gummy texture and that gumminess adds
extra resistance whereas when you get
linen that's processed by modern methods
they treat it with chemicals that strip
away all that waxy pectin fiber and then
it has actually less resistance to
penetration so that mattered we
experimented with not gluing layers but
just putting together a whole bunch of
layers that were sewn together so
quilted we also experimented with
stuffing layers with wool and other
substances between them the pure quilted
non glued layers again were about ten
percent less effective than the glama
native than with glue so they were okay
there were good protection but not quite
as good stuffing it was stuff didn't
work at all the arrows rip right through
this modern technology made a difference
so whether we shot this with the modern
hunting Arrowhead it just ripped right
through it so don't go running around
the woods and hunting season thinking
he'll be safe wearing one of these the
sharper edge on modern steel makes a big
difference so the the sharpness the
hardness of the metal is a big factor
and the ancient arrowheads are made out
of bronze and iron which are relatively
soft compared to modern arrowheads
putting that finer edge greatly
increases the penetrative ability of
arrows in conclusion this seemed to be a
bit like sort of a classical version of
Kevlar so one of the ways that it works
very effectively is when metal armor is
struck let's say by an arrow the entire
force of that arrow mass times velocity
is transmitted to the one tip of the
arrowhead whereas with this the
laminated slab actually flexes and bends
a bit under impact and so it
disseminates some of that force
throughout the entire slab and so that's
one of the reasons why it provides good
protection is because it has this bendy
ability which helps to spread out the
impact when things hit it we also
compared it to some bronze so we got
some bronze plates that were we thought
and we tried to get some blacksmiths who
would make these ceramic in traditional
ways that were roughly approximate to
ancient bronze and
thickest ancient bronze armor was about
two millimeters thick so we got some
bronze plates that were two millimeters
thick and also some that were one
millimeter thick and shot these and what
we discovered is that a roughly 10
millimeter thick line of thorax was the
equivalent in terms of protection and
penetrative ability to two millimeters
of bronze in other words the heaviest
bronze armor so this provides about the
same protection as the best bronze armor
you would have had but the line of
thorax is one-third the weight so for
much less weight you get equivalent
protection we also did some less
scientific testing I have lots of
ancient weapons and replicas we hit
these with everything we had we hit them
with maces with swords we threw Spears
at them we hit them with modern axes
which we almost harm the student here
because it bounced back so strongly we
did all kinds of tests and while I can't
claim these are as scientifically valid
it stood up quite well particularly just
sort of blunt-force trama things like
the mace and the axe those just bounced
right off with barely leaving a scratch
in the linen we towards the end of our
testing we also did some LivePerson
tests where Scott my Stuart volunteered
to put on the armor and I stood about 15
feet away and shot him at point-blank
range and here I have to have the
official disclaimer do not attempt this
yourself we are experts seriously so
here I am aiming at Scott you want to
guess what the outcome of this test was
well sometimes things don't turn out as
you hoped
now he was fine he was fine and and I
mean by this point we had done about
1,500 test shots so I knew exactly how
far that was gonna go in the armor the
only variable is how good an archer I am
but fortunately I've been shooting bows
since I was a kid so you can see they
would stick out quite dramatically um
and you can imagine in ancient Greek
warrior looking like a pincushion with
these things sticking out all over but
being basically unharmed it really
doesn't go through this in a way that's
gonna cause any sort of serious injury
so this was nice again confirmation of
some of our earlier our work we
eventually did lots of these because
this might mention we ended up on some
documentaries they all wanted to see me
shooting student and this and I kind of
felt bad about this because this really
has not much scientific value this isn't
a controlled circumstance but it looks
really good in conclusion then so what
are some of the conclusions about this
well the line of thorax turned out to
have some significant advantages over
comparable Arab bronze armor among these
are the fact that it's a lot cooler and
this is a big one I mean if any of you
re-enactors have worn armor and the Sun
you get baked and imagine being in
ancient Greece a hundred degrees Suns
scrambling over a bunch of dusty
hillsides if you're wearing metal armor
you get cooked it's like being in an
oven but this is linen like a nice linen
shirt and so it's much cooler if it's
cooler it gives your soldiers greater
endurance they can fight longer they can
run faster they can run further this is
actually a significant military
advantage it's lighter as I said a suit
of this one here weighs about 11 pounds
a comparable bronze [inaudible] would be
at least 25 pounds a shirt of chainmail
would be 27 to 30 something pounds so it
is lighter than comparable types of
armor while still offering the same
degree of protection linen again like I
said it gets a little bit stronger than
wet so this would have been a bad thing
to give your Marines for people aboard
ship to use this does raise the issue
however of waterproofing in fact your
own sweat raises the issue of
waterproofing
so we do think in the ancient world they
had some waterproof glues since we don't
we experiment with various forms of
waterproofing the armor
so we tried treating it with various
things including pine resin lanolin and
beeswax all of which would have been
readily available and we did some tests
where we made little test samples coded
them in these substances subjected them
to a 12-hour simulated hard rain with a
sprinkler after which we immerse the
test patches in a bucket of water for 4
hours so this was a fairly rigorous a
waterproofing test and what we found is
that beeswax was actually really
effective so if you melt beeswax put it
over this or even just rub some onto the
armor it actually makes it not quite
waterproof but very water resistant and
it was also fairly easy to repair even
if a piece sort of came free and came
delaminated it's easy enough to just
blue back down when it dries beeswax had
the unexpected side bonus effective also
making it smell nice which in an era of
armies before deodorant that might not
have been an inconsiderable advantage
another thing about this is it uses
common materials and skills so unlike
bronze armor which you need a blacksmith
a professional highly trained and
expensive professional to make also you
would need rare materials bronze was
expensive tin had to be obtained from
far away this is something that
literally almost any farm could have
made and more interesting it's something
that any woman could have made because
they're the ones with the sewing skills
almost every household the girls and
women knew how to spin and weave thread
this was something they were all
producing so you could easily envision a
household making armor for the men of
the household the women doing this and
that has some interesting economic
implications for the labour of people in
the ancient world and particularly the
role of women in this manufacture also
the the rabbit glue things like that
would have been readily available by the
way one of the sort of side effects of
rabbit glue when we were building this
is if you try making one of these
yourself I caution you to keep your dog
away from it I have a dog and the rabbit
glue very much interested him and
he clearly interpreted this whole
project as we were manufacturing
interesting chew treats for him so he
kept trying to chew on the armor so keep
that in mind it's cheaper so again it's
certainly cheaper than bronze but even
compared to things like leather
depending how common big animals that
produce leather like oxen you want to
get the thick leather from the back of
an oxen to make armor are this could
have been cheaper often than even
leather and easier to make at other
places whether you have common a lot of
cattle it might have made more sense to
use leather armor but often I think it
would have been cheaper even than those
sorts of things
um it's also really comfortable I've
worn lots of different armor and my back
always ends up killing me this not only
is lighter but we found that when you
wear it for a couple hours the glue
starts to soften up a little bit and it
starts to mold itself to your particular
body shape so unlike other armors I've
worn where you're just stuck with it if
something rubs you uncomfortably this
will actually kind of adjust itself to
fit you and it made it much more
comfortable to wear than other sorts of
armor
it's that and you can also made this in
a couple sizes sort of you know small
medium large and then with the ties you
can adjust it to fit individuals so it's
fairly flexible you could mass-produce
this in a way that you couldn't
mass-produce metal armor which more has
to be fitted to just one person
and finally our test shows it's good
protection
it really would protect you from the
most common hazards from arrows in the
air that we were interested in we're
still continuing some aspects of the
project so there's some side avenues
that we want to explore that we're still
working on but we finished the main one
now we've come to a logical stopping
point it has resulted this year and the
publication of a book of which my
students Scott is actually listed as a
co-author which is kind of cool for an
undergraduate for a University Press
book so this is inspiration to those of
you who are students in the room maybe
you can get involved in research
projects with your professor and
actually make some contribution to a
scholarship
I do want to acknowledge all the other
people besides myself who have worked on
this there have been many of them and in
particular today I want to draw your
attention to this a hoplite on the end
here this
noble Greek warrior some of you may
recognize this this is your own
professor Mike Bailey of Iowa State
so among others he participated in some
of the experiments here all right we
have a website I encourage you to look
at that we have some videos on there we
have a pattern if you want to make one
of these yourself thank you very much
[audience applauds]
I'd like to suggest I do have some
examples that I'd like to let you come
up and play around with touch the
various fabrics maybe try on the armor
but let me see if there's just a couple
questions first and then we can move on
to that and said yeah we had exactly the
same thought I mean once we start to
build this we were in love with
laminated armor so we actually made some
Greaves we made helmets we played around
with them and I suspect yes that was
done in particular Greaves I've worn
metal Greaves and they're really nasty
they they grab and they scrape you and
stuff but when you make them out of the
fabric you know they have that bendable
nature so you can make them sort of
curved and then just open them up fold
them and kind of clip them on your legs
and they're already a lot softer than
metal armor so I suspect this stuff was
done unfortunately we don't have
explicit literary attestation for other
uses of it in armor there is a mention
when one place two linen helmets so
there actually is one literary source
for that and again maybe those low
fragments that were found in the graves
at Mycenae in other places maybe those
were Greaves or something else so I
suspect they did this but I don't have
the conclusive proof that I can really
say that definitively yep
yes [mumbling]
um Hollywood loves flaming arrows and
the prom with flaming arrows is it
greatly degrades the ballistic qualities
of them they really aren't going to
penetrate things very well if they have
this big flaming wad on the front of
them now I suppose if you're unlucky
enough to be wearing this and get hit
one in your glues flammable maybe you're
in trouble
but I really don't think that was such a
serious hazard on the battlefield that
they're a little over exaggerated their
utility they're often more hazardous to
the user than the person you're shooting
them at but it's it's sort of an
interesting thought yes [mumbling] yeah so the
question is about the lofted shots when
we shot them up how far away were we how
high was the loft I mean a lot of this
had to do with how good our archers were
so you know we were aiming at test
patches and for the lofted thing what we
actually did was get a hang a sort of
big curtain put a whole bunch of test
patches on it and then got a bunch of
people in a mob to sort of loft a ton of
arrows so that hopefully one or two of
them would actually hit one of the test
patches so we got how we didn't even
measure it because it was too far but you
know we have to sort of move to the next
field
it's a click from the test ground so it
was at least you know 150 200 yards away
and so at that point you're getting just
sort of classic 45-degree angle or arc
on it in terms of the actual height they
went to I couldn't say but it was you
know 100 feet 200 feet something like
that maybe I'm more than that actually
more than that yes
okay so when you get hit by it it
doesn't cause damage that's not just by
the cut but by the force the impact with
arrows we were kind of curious about
this because if they'd seem as hard you
know when you shoot the arrows thunk you
know and it sounds very bad and that's
why I actually should get my student was
kind of interesting and we found out
that you know we expected maybe it would
knock him back a little or something but
it really doesn't I mean the arrow just
doesn't have enough force to it to
really you know harm someone so when he
got hit by it it sounded dramatic again
but it inflicted no no damage now if you
were wearing one of these and you hit
somebody wearing one with a mace or an
axe yeah I think you'd be breaking ribs
maybe rupturing organs things like that
so like any kind of armor if the shock
gets transmitted through it to your body
you can cause soft tissue injury or even
break bones and things like that and if
you've noticed in some of the vase
paintings with the Greeks wore
underneath these was sort of like a big
super loose t-shirt that they would get
all folded up in lots of folds so you
would actually have this big thick
fabric about that thick folded over
itself under it and the purpose of that
is obviously to be a kind of shock
absorber so to further disseminate and
protect you from some of those
blunt-force trauma kinds of injuries so
no I mean I think you know if you put
this on I whacked you with an axe I
think it would cause some damage but it
probably would save your life and it
actually transmits the force less than
something like metal where is if your
skin's right up against the metal you're
gonna get the full force of it
transmitted through the metal whereas
here because it has that flex to it it
is losing some of that force
disseminating some of the force because
of its its flexibility any other
questions?
all right I invite you to come up to
play with the stuff this is hands-on
come have a look at it
[end]
