Archaeologists studying Roman artillery at the ancient Roman battle site of Burnswark Hill in Dumfriesshire, southwest Scotland, have discovered that a type of sling-bullet that whistled when thrown. They believe this was a deliberate design intended to instill fear in enemy troops under assault.
Burnswark Hill is an Iron Age hillfort embraced by two Roman camps, one of the north slop, one of the south. The camps were first believed to be siege camps built to assault the fort, but in the 1960s some archaeologists postulated they might instead be training camps. There are references in ancient sources to the assiduous Roman training procedures, but evidence of them in the archaeological record is almost impossible to pinpoint. Training exercises could be the reason for the large number of Roman projectiles — 130 lead sling-bullets, 11 ballista shots, nine iron arrowheads — found on Burnswark Hill in earlier excavations.
Initial research found that the bullets, cast from lead and thrown with a sling apparatus, came in two main varieties: type I, larger and lemon-shaped, and type II, smaller and acorn-shaped. When Dr. John Reid of the Trimontium Trust secured a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to survey and dig the site, his team found a third type: a small oblong in which a hole had been drilled on one side. The type III bullets weigh 20 grams (type I goes up to 60 grams) and the holes are just .5 mm in diameter. They are all the same standard size.
Drilling holes in cast lead is time and labour-intensive for a projectile that is going to be thrown and almost certainly lost. It also lightens the ball which means it will cause less damage in a direct hit. Reid at first considered whether the holes might have been used to deliver poison, a form of early chemical warfare, but his brother had a better idea.
Reid’s brother, a keen fisherman, offered some insight into their possible purpose when he suggested the bullets were designed to make noise in flight.
“I said, ‘Don’t be stupid; you’ve no idea what you’re talking about. You’re not an archaeologist,'” Reid joked. “And he said, ‘No, but I’m a fisherman, and when I cast my line with lead weights that have got holes in them like that, they whistle.'”
“Suddenly, a light bulb came on in my head — that’s what they’re about. They’re for making a noise,” Reid said.
Experiments with replica bullets and slings confirmed that Reid’s brother was onto something. They were useless for holding poison. The hole was tiny and there was no guarantee the small, ballistically inferior bullets would even penetrate the skin. While flying towards their targets, however, the projectiles did make a whistling or high-pitched buzzing noise like an irate bee. The replica experiments also confirmed that the bullets could be successfully thrown in small clusters of three or four for a grapeshot effect.
The point of the sound was to intimidate and make the enemy crouch down or dodge around in the attempt to avoid the strike. If you throw a projectile and it hits, you take out a guy, but if you throw a projectile and it makes a sound as it approaches, anyone in the line of fire is going to duck or dodge reflexively. In a full-on assault, the missile storm would generate a huge amount of noise as hundreds, even thousands of bullets whistled toward the enemy lines.
It total, the Burnswark Project found 700 sling-bullets, more than have been found on any other Roman battlefield in Europe. The projectiles ranged over a full half kilometer (third of a mile) across the battle front. The type III bullets are unique. They have been found on no other Roman battlefields. Examples of pierced sling-bullets have been found on Greek battlefields from the second and third centuries B.C., but they were ceramic, not cast from lead.
The Burnswark Project findings do not support the training camp theory. That high of an expenditure in effort and materiel would be wasteful in training. Reid believes the fort on Burnswark Hill was targeted by a sustained Roman attack probably during the reign of Antoninus Pius who went north of Hadrian’s famous border wall in an attempt to conquer Scotland. He did gain some ground — see the Antonine Wall — but Roman legions retreated to Hadrian’s Wall in less than a decade.
Dr. Reid’s full article on the Burnswark project, “Bullets, Ballistas, and Burnswark,” is available in the print edition of Current Archaeology. There’s a tantalizing exerpt of the beginning of the article on the magazine’s website. There’s also a cool drone flyover video of Burnswark Hill with Roman fortlet and camps labeled. There are sheep on the Roman north camp now and I don’t think they don’t like the drone much.
[youtube=https://youtu.be/GTJb0gaZMkE&w=430]
Here’s a recording of the sounds the replica type III bullets made when thrown with a replica sling. The thwack-pew combination is pretty badass. It would surely have been scary hurtling at you or whizzing past you, downright terrifying when multiplied by hundreds.
[audioplayer file=”http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Bullets-sound.mp3″ titles=”Type III bullets whistle when thrown”]
This is such a great post — from the fisherman’s input to the worried sheep. LD, you’re a master. Thanks!
If the Romans didn’t use them elsewhere, I wonder whether they picked the idea up locally. People have presumably been fishing for salmon on the Nith, Annan, and Esk for centuries.
By the by, I used to scramble about there as a boy. I don’t remember those conifer plantations but then my memory is lousy anyway.
I found the drone shots fascinating. When you are short-trousered everything looks big; the drone gives more proportion.
‘Don’t be stupid; you’ve no idea what you’re talking about. You’re not an archaeologist,’
Reminds me of the geology of the Sphinx and the water erosion missed by all the archaeologists, who of course knew very little about the weathering of rocks! Academic vanity and hubris as usual. Nothing upsets the “experts” like being shown up by “non-expert”.
Loved the article! That vid was cool too. :yes:
> Reid’s brother suggested the bullets were designed to make noise in flight.
> “I said, ‘Don’t be stupid; You’re not an archaeologist,’” Reid joked. “And he said, ‘No, but when I cast my line with lead weights that have got holes in them like that, they whistle.’”
> “Suddenly, a light bulb came on in my head — that’s what they’re about. They’re for making a noise,” Reid said.
It’s amusing how it reads like Reid’s brother wasn’t even involved his brother’s ‘lightbulb’ revelation, after he’s literally just stated it. It’s like the trope we’ve all seen before.
Great music and running sheep alone are adorable. Also, the whistling sling-bullets and the fishing connotation make perfect sense, but poisoned bullets also must have played a certain role. Auxiliaries using slingshots are depicted on the Trajan’s Column and, according to Tacitus, were deployed at Mons Graupius.
According to Aulus Cornelius Celsus (roughly 25 BC- 50 AD), De Medicina, Book VII:
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“… there is a third kind of missile which at times has to be extracted such as a lead ball, or a pebble, or such like, which has penetrated the skin and become fixed within unbroken. In all such cases the wound should be laid open freely, and the retained object pulled out by forceps the way it entered. But some difficulty is added in the case of any injury in which a missile has become fixed in bone, or in a joint between the ends of two bones.
When in a bone, the missile is swayed until the place which grips the point yields, after which it is extracted by the hand, or by forceps; this is the method also used in extracting teeth. In this way the missile nearly always comes out, but if it resists, it can be dislodged by striking it with some instrument. The last resort when it cannot be pulled out, is to bore into the bone with a trepan close by the missile, and from that hole to cut away the bone in the shape of the letter V, so that the lines of the letter which diverge to either side face the missile; after that it is necessarily loosened and easily removed.
If the missile has forced its way actually into a joint between the ends of two bones, the limbs above and below are encircled by bandages or straps, by means of which they are pulled in opposite directions, so that the sinews are put on the stretch; the space between the ends of the bone is widened by these extensions, so that the missile is without difficulty withdrawn. In doing this care must be taken, as mentioned elsewhere, to avoid injury to a sinew, vein or artery while the weapon is being extracted by the same method which was described above.
But if the missile is also poisoned, after doing all the same things, even more promptly, if possible, in addition that treatment is to be applied which is given for one who has drunk poison, or has been bitten by a snake. The care of the wound itself after the extraction of the missile does not differ from that of a wound in which nothing has lodged and on which I have said enough elsewhere.”
Fascinating post. I like hearing about innovative technologies of past times. I was hoping you’d have some audio of the sounds, and you did not disappoint. I’d feel pretty nervous if that sound came at me. I’ve known men who’d been in field combat talk about the sound of bullets buzzing overhead driving them batty. It was the sound that got to them, they said. Psychological warfare, back in Roman days. I guess it’s a pretty obvious tactic: Native Americans used eery calls to unnerve their opponents.
Sheep-think: drones = raptors. Clump together and run. Big moving target.
Dearieme… you are a guy? Learn something new every day.
Very interesting piece on the Roman low-velocity/non-detonating version of the “Screaming Mimi.” Wonder if the Caledonians had a term for “incoming!?”