Cover of BAR S394, with the stipple image of the Croy Hill relief.

At the same time, just as I had changed the ‘look’ of the drawings between editions 1 and 2, I wanted to do something a little different for the third edition by incorporating tone to indicate the materials used. This would enhance the appearance of the drawings but also provide more information for the reader in an intuitive form.

As an example, let’s look at decorated dagger scabbards. Having already produced a colour illustration of the recently discovered and conserved dagger from Haltern (DEU), it was a (fairly) simple matter to convert this to monochrome, reflecting the materials used, to replace the Velsen drawing.

Comparison of the coloured illustration of the Haltern dagger and scabbard (left) and a monochrome version (right) employing the material tone conventions for B&C3. Images: MCB

However, the Velsen scabbard was too good to lose completely, so it was worth adding to the main page of dagger scabbards. Similarly, the scabbards there were rather muddled and needed moving around into a more logical order. The Allériot (FRA) scabbard had to go (the published description of materials employed was too vague too identify the materials used) and the plain Mainz (DEU) scabbard essentially duplicated the Leeuwen (NLD) item which, although there was some raised detail, was not inlaid. Adding one of the Usk (GBR) scabbards added variety and filled out the story of early Principate dagger scabbards.

Comparison of the B&C2 illustration of Principate dagger scabbards (left) and the draft B&C3 version (right) employing the material tone conventions for B&C3. Images: MCB

This, then, provides the logic for the different order of the pieces, the appearance of some new ones and exclusion of others, as well as the overall ‘look’ in one of the illustrations, and the substitution of another.

The drawings for B&C3 are still at the draft stage and things may change in due course, but this at least will give a flavour of what is to come.

At the end of February 1993, Batsford Books published the first edition of our Roman Military Equipment from the Punic Wars to the Fall of Rome (B&C1). This was effectively an expansion of the ideas we put forward in our short booklet, also called Roman Military Equipment, published by Shire Books in 1989 (B&C0). When Batsford divested themselves of their archaeology list, we published our 2nd edition with Oxbow Books in 2006 (B&C2).

We have been considering producing a 3rd edition of Roman Military Equipment (B&C3) for some time. For us, certain conditions had to be met to justify this, not least sufficient new and interesting finds which affect the story we wish to tell. At the same time, we have decided to expand the compass of the book chronologically, by extending the start and end points. We will also add pointers to the equipment of the principal enemies that Rome faced, particularly where this had a bearing on the development of Rome’s own equipment. We also felt that, just as with the transition from B&C1 to B&C2, B&C3 should have revised illustrations. New items will be substituted at various points where they better support the text.

Whenever a new edition of a book is published it is a legitimate concern that it will be the same as the last, plus corrections, and thus not worth the additional purchase (we have all been caught out by this in the past). Rest assured that, just as B&C2 was massively expanded and updated from B&C1, B&C3 with be covering new chronological ground, new areas of study, new discoveries, and have an even more packed bibliography.

The booklet

Not everybody wants and needs the large book, however. To cover more popular interest in military equipment, we will be producing a short (and cheaper) introductory booklet, equivalent to the 1989 Shire booklet (but in full colour and also with revised illustrations), as well as an accompanying educational wall poster. To avoid confusion with its bigger brother (as happened with the original volume), this will be titled An Introduction to Roman Military Equipment.

The source books

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, we wanted to introduce some completely new elements as part of the project: freely accessible source material to back up (or perhaps even allow the reinterpretation of) our text. To this end we will be simultaneously producing three open access source books (with appropriate Creative Commons licences) of literary, representational, and archaeological evidence. We hope that these will be downloadable for free in digital format but will also be available to be purchased as hardcopies, for those who are fans of pulped dead trees.

The website

To support the study of Roman military equipment even further, there will be a categorised bibliography accessible in standard formats such as BibTeX. This will be just one of several new elements we will add to this website. Further additions will include a comprehensive glossary of military equipment terminology and a gallery of artefacts, replicas, and 3D reconstructions of Roman militaria, as well as a list of museums (with contact details) which contain important collections of military equipment and/or relevant iconographic material. There will also be a Roman military equipment bookshop (both popular and more technical volumes), proceeds from which will help fund the costs of this website. Finally, we will provide links to downloadable ebooks on the subject of equipment and this will include searchable PDF versions of B&C0 and B&C1.

Anything else?

We have other ideas (such as a series of podcasts) that we may well include in the project in due course. The current text, notes, and bibliography update file stands at more than 16K words. A proportion of which is substitution, rather than just addition (B&C2 is about 123K words, including index). We have not signed a contract and do not as yet have a publication date, since work on this project is still in progress. When we have more news, we will make it available here.

There are hundreds of artefacts illustrated in edition 2 of Roman Military Equipment, and we have often been asked why use drawings and not photos in B&C2? This question has some history to it.

Our first book on the subject, published by Shire Publications, had to be produced using the minimum resources available: there was no allowance for photographs. We simply could not afford to illustrate everything we wanted with photographs. Thus, using specially prepared ink-on-film line illustrations was an obvious solution, given that one of us was trained as an archaeological illustrator.

The same consideration came into play (albeit on a much larger scale) when we moved on to produce the Batsford volume, even though we had a small allowance for illustrations for that. We decided to put that towards a colour plate section in the book and expand the line drawings to serve most of our needs. The advantages of line drawings are that 1) it is possible to present artefacts with a consistent lighting source (top left, as in most archaeological artefact illustrations); 2) more than one photographic or line source image can be consulted to produce a composite result; 3) the drawings can have a consistent style and range of scales across the volume. As with the Shire, these were all ink-on-film drawings for B&C1.

For the second, Oxbow, edition of the larger book (B&C2), all of the original ink-on-film drawings were scanned at high resolution before being revised and enhanced. Some had items replaced or re-arranged, others were completely new additions reflecting the broader scope of the text, but all were also given a tonal refresh to help the objects ‘pop’ from the page. Labelling styles were also changed to make them less obtrusive.

The phenomenon of books by other writers appearing with unnecessarily ‘redrawn’ versions of our illustrations subsequently inspired us to make the B&C2 drawings freely available with a Creative Commons BY-SA-NC licence. If contacted, we also usually give permission for commercial reuse of the illustrations, particularly by early career or independent researchers. To save time, then, this licence has now been modified to BY-SA, so use them! You can also find some of our illustrations used on web pages.

Ultimately, a decision that was taken due to limited resources has turned out to be one of the best we made. That, in a nutshell, is why we made the decision to use drawings and not photos in B&C2.