[William P]

heres a question and a half, when did the large round shield, centre gripped, become a commonplace piece of equipment in the way it would be in the viking age
(im aware of the roman parma and some lusitanian shields but by and large everyone seemed to use long centre gruipped shields when not using the aspis for most of antiquity

we have the theuros, the barbarian oval shield, the scutum etc, the parthians used large rectangular wicker shields, list goes on

at some point however, the round shield came to dominate the landscape of warfare in europe, do we know when and how this occured?
my guess is that it's an import from the germanic migrations

[Matthew Amt]

Well, in some areas, round shields were the rule in the Bronze Age. Though some places (Sumeria, Crete, Greece) have tall rectangular or oblong/figure-8 shape. But even Greece had gone to mostly round shields by the end of the Bronze Age. Then you get Assyrians, too.

BUT if you're mainly looking post-Roman, it would be much earlier than the Viking era. Romans are using center-gripped round shields by the 4th century AD, though they use them with the grip horizontal rather than vertical, which makes a difference in several ways. (Obviously you can rotate it, but...) Some of the incoming tribes in the Migration era had taller shields (hexagonal, coffin-shaped, etc.), but it looks to me like most of northern/western Europe (and beyond) has gone to round shields by what, 6th century? Maybe 7th? It's not my strongest era!

Matthew

[William P]

[Dan Howard]

The most common shield right through the Dark Ages and the majority of the Middle Ages seems to have been a center-gripped round shield.

[Mark Millman]

Dear William,

Connolly suggests, but doesn't state outright, that after the replacement of the semi-cylindrical scutum by the oval shield formerly reserved for auxiliary use in the middle of the third century C.E., Roman shields gradually got less oval and more round. The implication is that round shields--dished rather than flat, but center-gripped--were widely distributed in Roman-influenced areas by the third quarter of the fifth century. Vegetius (late fourth century) provides a waypoint (to which Matthew refers above) when he mentions that each Roman soldier carried five plumbata in the hollow of his shield.

It's true that there's size variation among barbarian round shields, but the ideal is clearly large ones of around 90 cm diameter. That's what the high-status shields from which metal rims survive tend to measure.

As to how (by which I assume you mean why; if you really mean how, then you're looking for diachronic mapping of their spread and you'll have to consult the archaeological reports that cover the topic) it occurred? Fashion. I wouldn't look for a technical or technological reason (modern people tend to overemphasize such reasons for material change), unless you want to argue that the change from flat boards to dished boards and from horizontal grips to vertical grips drove the change to round from oval shields. But I'm not sure that that level of detail is recoverable.

I hope this proves helpful.

Best,

Mark Millman