ranked phalanx of vase

[Lyceum]

Aargh ... RAT ate my first two replies by logging me out.

Thanks for the information on the Sikh arts. If any African spear-and-shield traditions survive, they don't seem to be taught outside of rural Africa. I'm not sure if the New Guinea highlanders use shields?

Right now I'm exploring the sources and available traditions for a few hours a month. The first step is to become a competent fighter in some traditional martial art that covers a variety of forms, and that takes several thousand hours. I'm about a quarter of the way there on Fiore's art. Then I can pick an ancient form and start compiling visual and textual evidence.

I think most sport fighters, like steel reenactors or the SCA, have rules which prevent a lot of historical techniques ... the SCA don`t allow fighters to attack the hands or shins, and steel reenactors heavily limit attacks to the face and neck and sometimes the forearms or shins. As a result, what works for their games isn't the same thing which worked for a 16th century Italian trying not to get a pike through the face.

You say that, and there may be some truth in that but the thing is with "knights" etc we know how they trained. The thing is, I'd take a person with a decent set of techniques trained to death in a live environment any day over the kind of person who spends so much time drilling a million different techniques but never sparring due to "safety" or whatever. Muscle memory etc counts for a lot, look what happened when Jigoro Kano first came up with Judo: his "sports" students pounded the hell out of all those other people from traditional schools utilizing ancient, proven techniques. The key here is how one trains.

I don't know at what point I can call myself a competent fighter. I've been Boxing and playing Judo for years, competed several times (and won) in both sports and spent the last year on Muay Thai and and BJJ (cliche, I know) and have had more than enough experience dealing with...unfriendly people.

I've been handling weapons since I was a small kid, not the ridiculous TMA stuff one sees in Kung Fu places but proper full contact stuff for the most part, i.e from the age of 6/7 I was always at the local temple learning all sorts, spears, tabar axes, swords, wrestling and some archery (my local temple was one of the few serious ones outside of India/Germany) and I've dabbled extensively in Kendo and the Filipino arts as well as Fencing (Sabre and Foil) for my university. I've been into HEMA (mainly Fiore and Vadi) for quite a few years now and we train pretty full on (only way to do it though) and the thing is, I still don't feel half way competent in many areas.

I don't mean simply to say that I feel incompetent in comparison to the people who had to use these techniques to survive, but that we#re faced with a huge mass of material across cultures and centuries with a million different weapons as well as several living arts and traditions and...and...I don't know it feels near impossible for us to get any real grasp on things, doesn't it?

Sorry for the long near autobiography, just thought I'd share experiences and to commiserate that I feel exactly the same. I agree with your methodology though that one has to first gain a serious grounding in any traditional form before attempting to reconstruct anything, even then it seems like such a doomed and fruitless endeavor...think I'll stick to my Homer.

EDIT: By the way, I know this is cheeky, but if in the coming months you stumble across any cool stuff germane to this topic, or the use of HEMA in reconstructing ancient stuff please, if it's no hassle, could you pass it on to me? I would be grateful.