Examination of a 14kg hoard of mail armor near the Roman legionary fortress of Bonn, Germany, offers new insights into the logistics of recycling and repair along the Roman Empire’s northern frontier.
The Roman army was a vast military machine that required huge amounts of equipment, all of which had to be maintained. Little is known about how this was achieved in peripheral regions of the empire, far from production centers and supply networks.
There is evidence that Roman soldiers on the frontiers were more self-sufficient, repairing and recycling their own armor. However, the extent to which surrounding settlements played a role in this was unknown.
This changed with the discovery of 14kg of mail armor during excavations in a civilian settlement outside the Bonn legionary fortress by the LVR-Amt für Bodendenkmalpflege im Rheinland in 2012.
It consists of two nearly complete mail garments and parts of two others, all corroded into a single mass. Since mail is made of small, interconnected rings that cannot be melted down, the recycling of such armor was different from most metal objects. Rather than repurposing the metal, mail garments were recycled by using them as “donors” to patch others, similar to how textiles were mended in antiquity.
To learn more about this discovery, researchers from three institutes: the LVR-Amt für Bodendenkmalpflege im Rheinland (Claudia Koppmann), the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn in Germany (Holger Becker), and the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno in Czechia (Martijn A. Wijnhoven) collaborated to study the mail. Their results are published in the journal Antiquity.
The large block of mail from the Bonn hoard. © J. Vogel
In addition to visual examination, the team used high-resolution computed tomography (CT) scans.
“X-ray technology allows us to see what cannot be seen with the naked eye,” says Becker. “To look inside the solid mass of Roman armor, only CT scans provided satisfactory results.”
According to the authors, the Bonn hoard likely constitutes a stockpile of material intended to be used for the repair of mail armor.
“This is the first clear evidence that mail armor was being repaired outside a Roman military installation,” states Dr. Wijnhoven.
Importantly, the find underscores the connection between Roman forts and surrounding civilian settlements. Far from Roman military installations, the army was likely reliant on local craftspeople to maintain their equipment, shedding light on the relationship between the Roman army and the people in their vicinity.
This provides key information on how the Roman army was organized and maintained.
“The find adds to a growing corpus of mail armor from a variety of different contexts across the Roman world, and beyond the frontiers, and contributes to understanding of the complexity of economic and military organization of ancient armies,” concludes Koppmann.
More information:
Recycling and repair on the Roman frontier: a hoard of mail armour from Bonn, Antiquity 2024. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.178
Citation:
Chain mail find shows local craftworkers were involved in the repair of Roman armor (2024, December 10)
