Gregory Aldrete: belief

Transcript context

…… the integrity of the material. That’s an art and the size probably that they understood deeply. The process of lamination did add something. So there’s actually a huge debate among scholars and actually a sort of amateur archeologist that was this linothorax thing glued together or was it simply sewn together? Was it composite, partially linen, partially leather, or other materials? And my honest answer is I think it’s all of the above, because again, every piece of armor in the ancient world was an individual creation. So I think if you had some spare leather, you put that in. If you wanted to make one that was just sewn together, or even quilted stuffed with stuff you do that, maybe you were good at gluing stuff, you use that. So I think there’s no one answer. We investigated one possibility because we just had limited time and money and resources, but I think all these other things existed at the same time and we’re variants of it. Just as a small aside, I just think this is a fascinating journey you went on. I love it. Sort of answering really important questions about, in this case, armor about military equipment and technology that archeologists can’t answer by using all the literary, so all the sources you can to understand what it looked like, what were the materials, using the materials at the time, and actually doing ballistic testing. It’s really cool. It’s really cool that you see that there’s a hole in the literature and nobody studied it, and going hard and doing it the right way to sort of uncover this. I don’t know, I think it’s an amazing mystery about the ancient world.…

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