Known specimens of lorica plumata

[CaesarAugustus]

Do we have evidences that the plumata was as desribed today, "a mail shirt (hamata) with small feather-like scales (plumes) attached to the rings", so that it was composed by a hamata plus an additional layer?

[Dan Howard]

There are enough extant examples to dedicate an entire volume of a journal to it.
https://www.academia.edu/1631975/Lorica_...red_Armour

Martijn calls this armour Lorica Hamata Squamataque, which is far better than the erroneous and misleading "plumata". The photo on the cover is a reconstruction of the Newstead example made by Erik D Schmid. I still have the patch of this armour that Erik included with the journal when it was first published.

[CaesarAugustus]

Well, it is interesting that the only finding in a decent state apparently comes from a Thrax prince of the first century.
From the conclusions: Above all, the information available is often inconsistent, impeding the general study of these loricae
as a group. None of the sources give allthe relevant measurements of all the elements that make up the armour,making comparison difficult.

From what read, from the described findings it is quite difficult to reconstruct the real form, and even the interpretation of the decent finding is showing scales that are much larger than the ones of the finding. So, we don't have a real reconstruction of this lorica. At least from this paper.

Anyway, the paper is interesting, thanks.

[Dan Howard]

Erik is the world's foremost expert on mail armour and is one of the few people on the planet who makes accurate reconstructions of extant examples. Museums trust him to restore their mail artefacts. He travelled to the UK to personally study the Newstead find. The second article in the above journal covers Erik's Newstead reconstruction but I don't know whether it is available for free. His analysis is given, in detail, in that article and his reconstruction follows that analysis precisely. The entire journal is available here.
https://www.erikds.com/?page_id=17

A preliminary discussion is here on RAT
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/romanarm...-t696.html

[Crispianus]

For Martijn:

Two fragments from Jerusalem are described in "Armis et Litteris, The military equipment of early Roman Palestine, Stiebel 2007" Page 53 including some details and dated to 8th of Elul 70AD.
However images have been redacted from the thesis and the description does not say if the scales are bent, but does mention iron mail coated by copper alloy scales of 10mm x 7mm with a  "midrib" and three holes at the top.

Edit: Came across a pic in a video with Guy Stiebel here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2OXd79VjnE
About halfway though an image is shown that I believe is the objects described above:

   

These look like ordinary scales to me so this may not actually be "Hamata Squamata" after all.... a picture paints a thousand words as they say....

[martijn.wijnhoven]

Thanks Ivor! I already had them in my database, but please keep them coming