Quote:Indeed great pictures.
Is it possible that between the remains there was no chain mail?
There was no traces of mail in the Illerup sacrifice.
The precense of socalled needlepoint arrow warheads, however suggests
that the Illerup warriors expected to encounter enemies in mail.
The needlepoints were designed to break the rings in mail and penetrate
the armour. If the enemies were not armoured normal broad arrow heads
with barbs would have been more effective, since they have a greater chance of damaging something vital in the opponents and are harder to
extract.
From the Vimose site we have a number of ring mails (1 complete)
and Vimose is earlier or contemporary with the large Illerup sacrifice
depending on which of the VÃmose sacrifices the ringmails belong to.
Quote:The finds must give a correct view of arms of the Germanic peoples around 200 AD.
These sacrifices are certainly much better than grave finds or Roman
descriptions, but they do not ansver all our questions as is evident
regarding the ring mail.
We dont know if they sacrificed everything. We dont know if they sacrificed everything in the same place or in the same way.
Even if they did sacrifice everything in the same way, at the same place we dont know how much is preserved.
Even if they sacrificed everything and everything is preserved, we dont know if the sacrfices are truly representative of germanic armies.
Maybe cavalry is under-represented in the sacrifices because they
managed to flee more often when the s*** hit the fan.
Lots of questions still to be argued about ;-) )
Cheers
Nithijo
aka Soren Larsen