Bret Devereaux

Compounding that, it's clear that mail was the lower 'status' armor from things like Trajan's column, but trying to figure its prevalence is tricky. Mail is just a lot less likely to be preserved in the archaeological record in a way that we can interrogate or even recognize.

Small ferrous rings just rust away into nothing, or into concretions. And mail is fair more repairable, reusable, resizable - and expensive enough to be worth keeping. Consequently, mail finds from any period, tend to be damn rare.

Well, and its coverage - along with scale - is just better. The segmentata offers no protection for the upper legs or groin - those are areas where a cut or puncture can lead to lethal blood-loss quite fast! Scale and mail cover those areas in most of their forms.

The coverage difference is, I think, why I am less shocked then some that this 'advanced' armor-type doesn't continue into the later periods, especially since it doesn't seem to have been worn with mail. It's just not a proto-brigandine.

What always baffles me is why it shows up in the west but not the east. If you asked me where I'd expected to see rigid, layered plate defense first, I'd have said the East, against more powerful bows. Obviously not!

I wonder if we're actually overthinking it, and it shows up in the west because that's where the local iron production included methods of producing lots of relatively cheap sheet-iron and this was a cost-saving measure for the less dangerous frontiers.