Herculaneum soldier

[mcbishop]

Got any useful info on the soldier, Mike?

Not a lot, sadly. Peter Connolly drew the equipment soon after it was found (but wasn't allowed to publish those drawings) but it then sat around mouldering for a while before anybody decided to do anything with it, so far as I understand it (and good quality information is not exactly easy to come by). Now it is at least being worked on and publication is apparently on the cards in the near future, but one has to be slightly concerned that a find of this importance has been shunted into an academic siding for so long (22 years!); the Corbridge Hoard festered for 13 years after the Robinson book, 24 years after its discovery, and you'd have thought we (I use the collective 'we' charitably, there) would have learned by now... but no, it's the 'same old same old'. Blimey, was I ranting?...

So, in short, there are a couple of articles in the National Geographic and then the stuff toured around a bit recently during which somebody kindly took piccies of the pieces for me. Can you tell we don't work in quantum physics, yet?

Mike Bishop