Ancient Slingshot Was as Deadly as a .44 Magnum

[de officiis]

Except the barbarians didn't utilize the sling I thought. It's kind of a Mediterranean thing. My first thought was that this must have been an auxiliary unit. It also reminded me of ancient Sumerian accounts of warfare where they bragged about letting a hail of clay pellets fly.

Well they theorize that the Romans were using them. I don't think I'd want a bunch of those things whizzing by my head, that's for sure.

[TheReal_ND]

Right well I assumed as much. The barbarians I meant would have been the Picts, Druids etc that the Roman auxiliaries fought. I don't think they used slings at all. It's fascinating to think that it's one of the most ancient weapons in written history and almost exclusively Mediterranean.

[Fife]

Ancient Slingshot Was as Deadly as a .44 Magnum

On a fortified hill in Scotland some 1,900 years ago, a Roman army attacked local warriors by hurling lead bullets from slings that had nearly the stopping power of a modern .44 magnum handgun, according to recent experiments.

The assault seems to have been deadly effective, for the local warriors were armed only with swords and other simple weapons, says John Reid, a researcher at the Trimontium Trust and one of the co-directors of the archaeological fieldwork at Burnswark, south of Edinburgh. . . .

...

To clarify the picture, Reid and Nicholson decided to scour Burnswark for traces of ancient Roman ammunition. . . . As a first step, the researchers learned to calibrate a metal detector so that it could distinguish the lead in an ancient Roman sling bullet from other metal artifacts buried at the site.

Trained metal detectorists then combed Burnswark’s hillsides and summit, producing more than 2,700 hits that Nicholson carefully recorded and mapped. Then the team ground-truthed the findings by digging five small trenches. The excavations revealed more than 400 Roman sling bullets right where the metal detectors indicated, as well as two spherical sandstone missiles known as ballista balls. The results suggested that 94 percent of the metal detector hits were in fact Roman bullets.

Impressed, the team began analysing the locations of the metal detector hits to better understand what had happened. They discovered a concentration of lead bullets across the entire 500-yard-long southern rampart of the Scottish hill fort, directly above one of the Roman camps. “This is just what we would expect from a besieging assault,” notes Reid. . . .

The Roman slingers would have exacted a heavy toll. 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.

The 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.”

I'll watch later if you can confirm... is this about modern slingshots based upon elasticity, or biblical slingshots based upon centrifugal force?

[TheReal_ND]

A sling I assume. I don't have the bandwidth to watch the video. Also, I think they are equating force delivered on impact which isn't as impressive as the .44 magnum title makes it sound. Certainly enough to pop a head like a cherry but it ain't punching a hole through an engine block.

[de officiis]

I'll watch later if you can confirm... is this about modern slingshots based upon elasticity, or biblical slingshots based upon centrifugal force?

I think he was trying to determine the purpose of the holes that the Roman slingers drilled into their projectiles. He said he wasn't very good with the technique using centrifugal force, so he had a device rigged that involved elastic bands. So it wasn't so much about how the things were fired as it was about the cool sound they make.

Skip forward to about 14:11 to hear it coming at you.

[Speaker to Animals]

I bet that dude benches about 340.

[doc_loliday]

They hit targets smaller than humans from 130 yards away with sling? It just seems so hard to believe.

[jbird4049]

A sling I assume. I don't have the bandwidth to watch the video. Also, I think they are equating force delivered on impact which isn't as impressive as the .44 magnum title makes it sound. Certainly enough to pop a head like a cherry but it ain't punching a hole through an engine block.

True...but poping a head like a cherry does seem adequate.

They hit targets smaller than humans from 130 yards away with sling? It just seems so hard to believe.

I don't know either, but after reading how well Mongols use to shoot, I could believe it is possible.

[Montegriffo]

So, how much training is it going to take me to become accurate at 44 magnum levels?

Maybe I should just rig up a little trebuchet thing like that guy in the video.

Not a trebuchet. Springs instead of a counterweight. More of a catapult.

[Montegriffo]

They hit targets smaller than humans from 130 yards away with sling? It just seems so hard to believe.

Don't need to be able to hit a specific target if you fire in volleys like longbows used to.