Today In Experimental Archeology

A relatively rare bronze armor has been shown to be effective in combat.

It had been thought to be purely ceremonial, but this (admittedly quite expensive) looks to be quite effective:

The Dendra armor, one of the oldest suits of bronze armor ever found, had been considered a purely ceremonial piece. It seemed impossible to use in battle due to its cumbersome design.

It took over a decade of research, elaborate numerical models, and 13 Greek marines fighting in it from dawn till dusk to prove it was surprisingly good at its job, despite its odd appearance. “This made the Mycenaean warriors some of the best equipped in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age,” says professor Andreas Flouris, a researcher at the University of Thessaly, who led the study.

………

“The Mycenaeans were an ancient Greek civilization that flourished during the late Bronze Age, roughly from 1600 BC to 1100 BC,” explains Ken Wardle, an archeologist at the University of Birmingham and co-author of the study. With their power centered around major cities like Mycenae, Thebes, Tiryns, and Pylos, the Mycenaeans peaked between 1400 BCE and 1200 BCE, when they occupied much of mainland Greece and gained influence over Aegean islands and Asia Minor.

The Dendra armor, a full-body bronze plate suit made by the Mycenaeans in 1450 BCE, was found in a tomb in the early 1960s in the village of Dendra, in southern Greece, just a few kilometers from the ancient city of Mycenae. Right off the bat, it caused a lot of turmoil in the research community.

 

The first step Flouris’ team took to design an experiment was to figure out what the daily ordeal of Greek soldiers fighting in the Trojan War looked like. Here, Homeric epics, properly filtered, proved quite helpful. “We analyzed Homer’s Iliad and combined the information that we extracted with physiological and biometeorological knowledge to create an 11-hour combat simulation replicating activities performed by elite warriors in the Late Bronze Age,” Flouris explains.

His team assumed the Trojan War happened in June between 1300 BCE and 1200 BCE, south of the southwest mouth of the Dardanelles Strait and northwest of Mount Ida. Given that, it was possible to figure out the conditions in which it was fought: sunrise was at 4:37 am, and the sunset was at 7:37 pm. The temperature ranged from 23.8° to 29.1° Celsius, and the humidity fell between 69.6 and 85.1 percent. The armies moved out of their camps after breakfast, performed weapons checks, and held commanders’ meetings, being ready for battle by roughly 2.5 hours after sunrise. Then, the Greeks marched roughly four kilometers to reach the walls of Troy, where the fighting happened.

The battle formations included the “promachoi”—the foremost fighters who formed the first line—and the “plithos,” men that were staying in the rear. The warriors took turns in the first line and then retreated to the rear to rest. Toward the end of the day, the armies disengaged and returned to their camps. The army operations lasted 11 hours each day.

During those 11 hours, a typical warrior in Homeric tales would go through 31 one-versus-one duels, 10 encounters with the enemy on a chariot, two chariot-versus-chariot engagements, and one chariot-versus-warrior-on-ship encounter (a ranged battle where the warrior defended beached ships from charging chariots). The composition of this ordeal was inferred from statistical analysis of fights in The Iliad. Each of those scenarios included a fair share of spear throws, sword strikes, shooting arrows, and spear strikes, all performed in full body armor. Overall, the whole day was effectively a long, high-intensity interval exercise.

“So, we asked a group of special-armed forces personnel wearing a replica of the Dendra armor to complete this protocol,” says Flouris. The 13 marines who volunteered were trained in historical combat, fitted with sensors that monitored their performance, and fed roughly 4,500 calories worth of goat cheese, roasted meat, olives, bread, water, wine, and other Bronze Age culinary delicacies. And then they had a go at it. 

………

All 13 soldiers were able to complete the protocol. They found it exhausting but doable. Their heart rates remained normal; their blood glucose concentration, blood lactate levels, reaction times to visual and auditory stimuli, core body temperatures, and other metrics all turned out okay. The armor did not hinder their performance too much, and it did a good job of protecting vital body parts. The research team also did numerical modeling that simulated heat dissipation at fighting intensities that were impossible to do with human participants due to safety reasons; this also confirmed the Dendra armor worked.

“We demonstrated that armor of this type was suitable for use in battle, not just purely ceremonial. The efficacy and variety of Mycenaean swords and spears have long been recognized. The addition of heavy armor [would have] given elite Mycenaean warriors considerable advantage over those with a shield only for defense or with the lighter scale armor in use in the Middle East,” Flouris says. Moreover, the elite fighting force wearing Dendra-style armor would have been brought to the front lines on chariots, which meant they were coming in well-rested.

Seriously neat.