Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
How do you solve a nearly 2,000-year-old jigsaw puzzle? That is the challenge which faced Bethan Bryan, a conservator at National Museums Scotland, when she began the process of piecing together dozens of fragments from a Roman arm guard dating to the middle of the 2nd century. Her job was to recreate how the brass armour would have looked on a legionary’s arm, in preparation for its loan to a major exhibition at the British Museum, Legion: life in the Roman army (see the section at the bottom of this page), after which it will go on permanent display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Surviving arm guards are rare – this is one of only three known from the whole Roman Empire – and although it is the most intact example of its kind, the armour had deteriorated into over 100 pieces by the time it was found at Trimontium, a major Roman fort near Melrose in the Scottish Borders, in 1906. Excavations at this site – named after the three peaks of the nearby Eildon Hills, which overlook the fort – have produced over 4,000 objects illuminating the lives of the people who were stationed and lived there from AD 80-180. Of international significance, they are the most important assemblage of finds from Roman Scotland.
The Trimontium arm guard has been in National Museums Scotland’s collection for over a century, but until recently it remained in pieces – and spread over multiple locations. Dozens of fragments were held in storage, while the upper section was displayed in the National Museum of Scotland, and the lower section was on loan to the Trimontium Museum, which reopened in 2021 following a major redevelopment (see CA 386; more than 200 of the items in its displays are on long-term loan from NMS). With the pieces finally reunited, it is now possible to appreciate the complete object’s visual impact and protective power.
‘This is an incredibly rare object, and this exhibition gave us the opportunity to rebuild it,’ said Dr Fraser Hunter, Principal Curator of Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology at National Museums Scotland. ‘It was both protection and status symbol – brass was expensive, and would have gleamed like gold on the legionary’s sword arm. It offers a vivid connection to this important period, when Scotland sat on the Roman Empire’s northern frontier.’
Interpreting armour
It took Bethan some 100 hours to rebuild the arm guard, looking for joining edges and for similar corrosion patterns on the surface of the metal so she could match the colours or textures. She was also able to establish that a few pieces that had been displayed in the upper arm guard actually belonged in its lower part.
It is only recently that the object’s original use has been fully understood: it was previously interpreted as body armour, and later as a thigh guard for a cavalryman, but after other comparable examples emerged it was identified as protection for a soldier’s sword arm. The guard was mounted on leather straps, some remnants of which have survived, and its metal strips overlap slightly (like the scales of an armadillo), so if something hit the wearer it would shoot off the arm and not catch. Corrosion traces and attachment holes testify to the presence of a (now lost) padded sleeve that would have been worn underneath.
In the exhibition, the arm guard will be displayed alongside a segmental cuirass, giving visitors an idea of how it all fitted together. Both are similar to the protection that certain gladiators wore, depictions of which have proven invaluable to identifying and reconstructing the Trimontium find.
‘The flexible arm guard is an iconic piece of equipment for Roman gladiators, so it is unusual to see it as a sword-arm protection for Roman soldiers too,’ said Richard Abdy, Curator of Roman and Iron Age Coins at the British Museum. ‘The segmental body armour also possibly derived from gladiator kit, and we even think that the training regime for the amphitheatre originally inspired combat training of the professionalising Roman army.’
In preparation for the guard’s display, Bethan has worked with specialist mount-maker Richard West to ensure that the object is stable, while presenting it in such a way as to bring it to life for museum visitors.
‘It is displayed in a flexed manner, so you can see how it would have worked, and so people can get the sense of it being for an arm,’ Bethan said. ‘We wanted to make sure we were revealing the object in a way that tells people something. We could have displayed this as a group of fragments, but what does that really mean to people looking at it? Now they can see what it would have looked like, and perhaps even imagine the person who would once have worn it.’
Legion: life in the Roman army
Protecting a superpower for over half a millennium, the Roman army acted – at its peak – as a military, naval, and police force to around a quarter of the Earth’s population. However, life for the majority of those serving in its ranks was surprisingly domestic, with many living in settled military communities stretching from Scotland to the Red Sea.
Legion: life in the Roman army (1 February-23 June 2024) explores the experiences of men, women, and children whose lives were impacted by the Roman military, sharing stories of real legionaries and challenging perceptions about what it meant to be a soldier at this time. Displays will demonstrate how the imperial army was as much an engine of social change as a formidable war machine, and how recruits from all walks of life joined to advance themselves, acquire Roman citizenship, and support their families (despite a general ban on marriage).
More than 200 objects – combining material from the British Museum’s collection with loans from 28 national and international institutions – are included in the exhibition, combining military objects with contemporary evidence of the people (citizens or non-citizens, free or enslaved) who lived in forts and frontiers across the empire. For more details, see http://www.britishmuseum.org/legion.
All images: Duncan McGlynn/National Museums Scotland
