Winter Clothing in 1st century AD legionary re-enactment

[Crispvs]

David,

I agree with you that things should be done in a friendly and respectful way. This is what I have tried to do throughout this discussion. At no stage have I tried to argue that trousers were not worn by citizen solders prior to Trajan's Dacian campaigns - merely that there is no evidence for their use by citizen soldiers before that time, so we should avoid making the assumption that they were. They may have been worn by legionaries before this time but even if it was true, we don't know whether it was thirty years or thirty days before.
Added to that, practical experimentation has amply demonstrated that using the clothing items the Romans ARE known to have possessed provides sufficiently good protection from cold already. Remember here that we are not talking about cold of the type sometimes found in Canada but that found in northern Britain and Europe. It is also worth remembering that parts of Italy and Greece can be very cold at some times of year. If our experiments show us that we are well enough insulated from the cold using what we know they had, we thus have justification for stating that the assumption that trousers are necessary for keeping out the cold is a false assumption. Therefore there is little justification for assuming that some soldiers must have used them. It is true that by the early second century AD some legionaries do seem to have been wearing them, but that does not mean we can assume they were worn any earlier. As Graham Sumner has pointed out earlier in this thread, trousers are suspiciously absent from the long list of clothing items known from the Vindolanda tablets.
In portraying legionaries we should aim as far as possible to use only what we have evidence for. If we lack evidence for something, we should only ever move to the area of assumption if it is obvious that something existed for which the evidence is missing - an incomplete picture, if you will. Practical experimentation has shown that first century AD clothing is not necessarily an incomplete picture which needs anything further to complete it.
Regarding your theoretical Syrian (actually, why make him theoretical, given that we know Syrians were stationed on Hadrian's Wall), this thread was supposed to be about what legionaries wore in cold weather. As an auxiliary, a Syrian archer does not really fall within the intended scope of the discussion.

With regard to myself, I must correct you on a small number of points.
Firstly, whilst it is true that I have worn reconstructed Roman cold weather clothing in very cold weather, I have never done this for more than two days at a time. I think you have confused this with my practical experience of alpine hiking in New Zealand, where I did, on a number of occasions, spend several days at a time above the snowline in deep snow wearing a level of clothing not wholly dissimilar to what the Romans had - ie: several pairs of socks, lower leg coverings, shorts, several layers on my upper body and a hat.
Secondly, I am not from Scotland. I was referring (as I noted above) to time spent in southern New Zealand, which is mountainous and which can become very cold at certain times of year. References to me wearing a kilt and hearing the sound of bagpipes on Sunday mornings simply reflect the fact that southern New Zealand was mainly settled by Scots, and the region still retains a reasonably strong Scottish character.

Crispvs