Thursday, September 12, 2013

How to Wage a Green War


Brits love archaeology, not the way you love your favorite pair of tennis shoes but rather it's love with passion.  There are people digging up Britain all the time mostly because there's so much time to find in the thousands of years and different cultures that have lived here.  Unfortunately for America, there isn't much to find as it's only about four hundred years back to colonial times and archaeology doesn't reveal much from pre-colonial times because north American Indians typically only used stone tools and rarely built any kind of monument.

One of the things that fascinates Brits about the War of the Roses is that they didn't really know where it happened.  King Richard III was killed thus ending his royal line and consequently making this one of the pivotal battles of all English history but there wasn't so much known about the detail of it.

The reason detail was difficult to determine is that much of what went into the war was salvaged.  Swords, armour, or any type of military hardware was extremely valuable so it would be collected by the other forces or other opportunists after the battle was over.  A knight's armour was extremely valuable and armour for his horse was worth a fortune.

Germany was building magnificent battle armour for horses in the Fifteenth Century and who knows if the knights imported their armour from Germany or it was built in England but, either way, they must have struck terrifying poses when they rode out ready for battle.  The horses must also have been magnificent as it would taken a very special horse to carry that much weight, particularly in battle.

The war was 'green' because very little was left behind after the salvagers got through with the battlefield.  The Brits learned about how the battle was prosecuted by some ingenious research with cannon balls but, unfortunately for the archaeologists, there wasn't much they could dig up and put into museums.

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