Lol I bet Thearos does 
Greetings,
Mauro.

Thearos wrote on Feb 6^th, 2013 at 2:23pm:


I dont have JSTOR 

Good, somebody needed to! 

and nobody points out that the shape of sling bullets is important ?

If they were catapult bullets they would be spherical rather than aspherical.

There ought to be some kind of school for historians where they have to go and use the tools/weapons/artifacts they talk about in order to add a level of common sense practicality into their arguments

Curious Aardvark wrote on Feb 12^th, 2013 at 6:50am:

There still seems to be a divide. I didn't go into archaeology (a long time ago!) largely because at the time exactly the skills Bill mentions were ridiculed. I know it's different now at least in some places.

Shapes of bullets being impractical, or at last rather odd,  for catapult usage is one of those things that Rihil utterly ignores in her book IIRC. She may be a historian of science, but not one with a scientific or engineering bent, it would seem.

Thearos wrote on Feb 17^th, 2013 at 5:52pm:

I'm hampered by not having the Campbell paper (havn't gone through the hoops to somewhere I might be able to access it ) and Rihil's book isn't with me.

To me the primary objection of the amigdaliform bullets (good word - must try and remember it) in the catapults is that they would not fly 'sharp end first' stably unless they were spun. They would tend to turn side-on, and as such have worse characteristics than the same mass in a sphere, as well as making them inaccurate. I looked in vain in her book for any suggestion that the bullets were spun, although I may have missed it. It would have evidently have needed quite a fancy mechanism.

Thearos wrote on Feb 18^th, 2013 at 2:45pm:

I was doing a bit of excavating in the archives of this site, mostly to remind myself what I wrote before on the matter .
I think the last time this came up was here http://slinging.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1303975125/12#12

I can't speak to anything Rihil might have written elsewhere than her book on the catapult, and of Campbell I can only recall the slightly acid review he gave to her book.

My recollection (summarised in the link above) is that Rihil makes claims about penetration on the basis of theoretical models of wound production and presumes for those purposes a spherical (ie. least pointy and therefore least penetrating possible) bullet. I believe she never quotes  directly the formula which she apparently applies, but gets figures for penetration which she then says could not have been achieved by sling-thrown bullets. By assuming a sphere, rather than the elongated forms we know were used, she raises her calculated figures for penetration wounds to occur. From her point of view, to the point where only mechanical catapults could have achieved the necessary velocity.

The thread I linked to above reminded me that she quoted practical experiments with wounding velocities for a spherical bullet of weight 8.5gm, and then transfers those directly to the much heavier weights of typical sling bullets as if it makes no difference. This was one of the places where I felt my faith in her line of reasoning being stretched.

I thought that in much of the rest of her book she insists that the amygdaliform projectiles were employed in catapults, as we know they were in slings.

It seemed to me she wanted things both ways - which rather annoyed me.

Has she published anything making the same arguments in peer revue, not that I have a great amount of confidence in that method of judgement? I don't think I have much to add that wasn't gone over in the earlier threads on this.