Hi folks,
I'm making a Mycenaean figure-8 shield. Pics after a while.

Looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Keep us posted.

Sounds great. I've always wondered how these might've been built, so it'll be interesting to see how you go about it.

We don't really know much about them. We know what they looked like from illustrations but that is about all. We only think that they were made from hide because some of the illustrations show a pattern that resembles the fur on cowhide. The Lion Hunt dagger shows the shield's back, which has a neck strap, not a central hand-grip (the shields were used with two-handed pikes). One illustration shows cross-hatching, which suggests that the construction might have involved wicker but that is on the later Dipylon shield, not the Figure-8 shield. The vertical keel on the facing tells me that a wicker backing was not needed. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with, Todd.

I think there is a lot of room to use bentwood and wicker skills to understand ancient shields. Most people come to shieldmaking from woodworking, metalwork, or leatherwork. Most traditional shields are based on a form you can easily make, whether spreading a skin over a frame or splitting one whole width off a tree with wedges, but we rarely have those intuitions because are are not weavers and woodbenders and butchers and because the fancy metal copies of the cheap wicker-and-hide shields survive better.