Ancient Drawn Wire? On the Wire Production of the Mail from Zemplín

Abstract

Despite its importance for jewellery history and the development of mail armour, the history of drawn wires and its associated tools in antiquity has not been sufficiently studied. In fact, the existence of drawplates has occasionally been doubted or denied altogether. Thus, it has been disputed that wires were produced by drawing and in consequence draw marks on wires were mostly considered as proof of recent forgeries. Together with Frank Willer, conservator for archaeological objects at the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn, a new method of drawing wire has experimentally been probed. It has thus been possible to reproduce characteristics apparent in the microsection of a mail ring from the burial of Zemplín, which dates to the end of the 1st century AD. This allows us to conclude that the wire for the mail armour was produced by rolling a thin metal and drawing it afterwards through a drawplate. With roll-drawing, a drawing technique has been identified which can account for the emergence of wire drawing in antiquity. Drawing of rolled thin metal imposes less technical constraints on the drawplates than drawing solid material. The work was carried out in collaboration between the Excellence Cluster 264 Topoi (D-5-5-1) of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the LVR-Landes Museum Bonn.