Unrivited javelin heads

[Crispvs]

As I said above, I just don't buy the idea of weapons with heads which were so poorly secured to their shafts that the shafts would able to be pulled out of them. If that were to be the case, the weapons would stand hardly any chance of getting to the battle in a usable condition. They wouldn't have been transported in tissue paper and bubble wrap after all.
What I can accept though is the possibility of shafts cracking or breaking off completely if the projectiles struck rocks, due to the effect of shock passing through the heads to the wooden shafts. Added to that, if there had been rain on the days immediately prior to the battle, the effect of hundreds of men moving across wet ground, particularly if they were fighting, would quickly turn it to mud. In such circumstances, missiles which hit the ground with force might well bury themselves in that same ground so that the heads were totally submerged. If the ground was naturally stony (as the ground around mountain passes tends to be) I think there would be a good chance of a lot of them striking stones just beneath the ground surface, resulting in broken shafts which might then become separated from their buried heads as the surface mud was churned up by men and horses, which might possibly drive the heads of such weapons further into the ground.
As was noted above by Peronis, spears, being thrusting rather than throwing weapons, would be unlikely to have been thrown so any spearheads would have to have entered the ground by a slightly different means. I would suggest that some spearheads might have been struck off by the weapons of opponents (the reason mediaeval spears often had a pair of reinforcing bars running down from their heads). In the melee these heads might well be trampled into the mud and then missed in the cleanup after the battle.

I think you can be sure that the vast majority of weapons expended during the battle would have been recovered after it. Those that were not must have been hidden somehow and as I said, I think the most like explanation would be wet, stony ground which could cause shafts to crack and heads to be buried more deeply than otherwise. Added to this, if the dead of the losing side were left to rot on the field, as we know happened sometimes in the past, both local people and travellers might have been inclined to stay away from it for the next few years. Eventually, bones would either be carried off by animals or break down in acidic soils, while the broken wood remaining in the weapon ferrules would rot away, leaving just the iron heads and cart tyres to be found by modern archaeologists.

What do you think?

Crispvs