SCUTUM, building and testing, some thoughts

[Matt Lukes]

The fact is you can't make properly functional spearshafts any other way than by coppicing.

Certainly it makes sense that the strongest spear shafts would be from these basically little trees, and an examination of the cross section of artifact hafts should support the idea that coppicing was used by the Romans for their production- but that doesn't support the idea that it was done for scutum wood, right? I don't know just how you'd prove this, which is why I asked about a source for support...