11-11-2006, 11:25 AM
Quote:Well, I've read that coppiced ash groves were commonly maintained and harvested for spear and javelin shafts, but like so much else in my brain I can't quote a source for that!
Mea culpa! B&C2 p.246.
The fact is you can't make properly functional spearshafts any other way than by coppicing. Lots of work has been done on prehistoric woodmanship in Britain, particularly on the tons of Bronze Age stuff from the Somerset Levels, where it is clear that they knew as much then as we do now about selection by type and form. The structure of a coppiced pole is so different from a dowel produced by machining a piece of lumber, because it employs both the xylem (inner) and phloem (outer) components of the wood and has all the structural benefits of being a tree in miniature. Thus there is no way that the Romans were not going to use coppicing to make spear shafts. There are certain 'givens' in woodmanship that are going to hold true throughout time, just as most Roman tools look like the modern ones.
So no it isn't specifically written anywhere that this was done, but 'as sure as eggs is eggs', it was! Incidentally, in England (as distinct from the UK in general) the specific characteristics of oak were used selectively in the Napoleonic period to encourage growth of oak 'standards' (single trees) in hedgerows precisely because they formed the elbows that were needed in ships because the trees adopt a different aspect when not in woodland. Similarly, the wood specialist who looked at the material from Carlisle told me that, whilst the earliest Cerealian fort was constructed from clearance timber (including alder), the later stuff showed clear selectivity and the practice of draw felling.
The sort of things Sean is talking about are exactly where the archaeologist learns from the craftsman. I am forever asking David Sim stuff about his tradecraft as a blacksmith and, in return, I can give him information about finds etc that might be of use.
Whilst my skills in woodsmanship are limited to wielding an axe (I know, I should be using a maul) to split logs, I had the good fortune to marry a palaeobotanist who currently administers a scheme to coppice hazel to make charcoal for a working 18th-century country-house kitchen.
Mike Bishop
