Plate Armor Endurance study

[Crispvs]

From what we can gather from the Mainz column base, the arch at Puteoli and Trajan's column, it would seem that soldiers distributed their equipment fairly evenly, with the shield on a strap resting around the left shoulder (not the man's back), the loculus, cooking gear and tools on the carrying pole resting on the left shoulder and hugging the upper back, and shafted weapons resting against and helmet carried on the right shoulder. Add to that the wearing of the body armour and I doubt that you could distribute the weight much more evenly than that with the equipment they had at their disposal. There is no guarantee that all soldiers carried their kit like this of course, and it would be easy enough to swap the shafted weapons and carrying pole over, but I think that if we can believe what these monuments show, they certainly knew how to distribute weight.

Crispvs