Ancient Slingshot Was as Deadly as a .44 Magnum

[de officiis]

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.”

[heydaralon]

Thats pretty badass.

[TheReal_ND]

Just imagine someone's head exploding from one of these. Far more morally devastating than anything an arrow could do.

[heydaralon]

Just imagine someone's head exploding from one of these. Far more morally devastating than anything an arrow could do.

They used a sling on deadliest warrior. Shit show, but cool visuals.

[TheReal_ND]

They sell them on Amazon. Just look for Shepard slings. I almost bought one. They are p cheap. You can use golf balls for target practice I guess.

[Calculus Man]

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.

[TheReal_ND]

A lot I guess. I gave up the idea of poaching squirrels with one because there is too much undergrowth in the woods here. Besides, I have no idea where I would practice with one. I'm not going to be that guy at the park slinging golf balls around.

[Calculus Man]

Yeah, frankly it'll be a looong time before I can sacrifice range time for a fun little distraction like this. I don't shoot enough as it is...

[de officiis]

The way the guy describes the battle reminds me of narratives of some of the Civil War battles where the guys basically lined up and then started blazing away at each other with .50 cal. minnie balls. A lead hailstorm.

[TheReal_ND]

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.