Did the quality of weapons and armor get worse?

[elagababbalus]

Has there ever been a longitudinal study of the quality of weapons and armor manufactured by the romans that compares military equipment manufactured in the early empire to late antiquity/early medieval. I dont know if that is even possible perhaps the purity of the metal used in manufacture? I have read that the mining of ores went into decline from the second century while most academics think the size of the army increased from the fourth century, did this translate into weapons and armor more likely to break in late antiquity/early medieval?

I have read elsewhere that the quality of other manufactured goods showed a marked deterioration in late antiquity eg pottery and was wondering if that applied also to military equipment?

[Endre Fodstad]

To determine that I believe you would need metallurgical analysis - which is destructive - taken from the same (and uncorroded, which means you'd have to delve into theitem) parts of similar equipment - which means most fragments will disqualify - of a representative sample of roman military equipment over a period of half a millenium- which, statistically, we don't really have, given that the preservation of iron items can sometimes be pretty random (of course it isn't really - it depends on the local condition the iron has spent the centuries in - soil, tomb, whatever) and will not just simply preserve a representative sample.

In Norway, enough viking age swords were recovered in the last century that Petersen was able to construct a real typology (rather than just a classification system) of hilt, and to a lesser extent blade, forms. We've had metallurgists working with and analyzing viking age swords for the last half-century in all our major museums. Yet we don't have anything resembling what you ask for - and even if we could, technically, sacrifice parts of a great deal of those blades to do cross-sections, it is highly dubious that our samples, being grave finds as most are, would really be representative of viking age swords.

I think that illustrates the problem. I hope this helps