Roman soldiers armed with slings used these lead bullets as ammunition 1,900 years ago in Scotland.N

Roman soldiers armed with slings used these lead bullets as ammunition 1,900 years ago in Scotland.National Geographic:Recent experiments conducted in Germany showed that a 50-gram Roman bullet hurled by a trained slinger has only slightly less stopping power than a .44 magnum cartridge fired from a handgun. Other tests revealed that a trained slinger could hit a target smaller than a human being from 130 yards away. “That’s exactly the distance from the front rampart of the south [Roman] camp to the front rampart of the hill fort,” Reid noted.TERROR TACTICSThe Romans also employed a previously unknown form of psychological warfare to terrify the Scots and undermine their resistance. While examining the bullets, Reid and Nicholson noticed small holes deliberately made in nearly 10 percent of the ammunition. Puzzled, the team cast replicas, and asked an experienced slinger to test them. The bullets with holes made “a weird banshee-like wail,” says Nicholson. “So you are getting these unworldly, unnatural sounds that you have never heard before, and people are falling over on either side of you.”Comparative isotopic studies of bullets from Burnswark and from other well-dated sites suggests that the bloody assault took place around A.D.140, early in the reign of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius. “He was a new emperor with a need for a military victory somewhere,” says Reid. By striking with exemplary violence at Burnswark, the emperor may have hoped to claim a quick success and subdue difficult tribes along its northern frontier.Fraser Hunter, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, calls the new research “really enterprising and exciting.” And he thinks that Burnswark now raises new questions about the problems that the Romans may have created for themselves when they built Hadrian’s wall and made new enemies among the Scottish tribes. -- source link

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