06-21-2014, 12:25 PM
Quote:he cites as authority the Preliminary Report of the Sixth Season of excavations at Dura, so that may be where the identification originates.
Yes, I think James too is, understandably given the volume of material he surveys, relying to a large extent on older interpretations. That can mean, perhaps, that he replicates a lot of the bias of older scholars, who wished to see Romans stretching to the horizon and would countenance no other origin for the objects they studied.
It can go the other way too: certain items, I think, were identified as 'Persian' because they didn't fit the accepted typology of 'Roman military equipment'. So, for example, the complete mail shirt found on the skeleton from the siege mine was believed to be Persian as it had a large trident design in copper links on the chest. James, I think, has more recently decided that this man might have been a Roman after all, although I don't know of his reasoning for this!
Anyway, back to the topic:
Quote:There's a guy in Legio XX that has a bit of Roman Lamellar that dates to the 3rd century IIRC.
He has it? As in owns it? Does he know where it comes from?
Nathan Ross
