New Roman scutum made with wooden slats

[Sergio Escudero]

Hello.

The other day I posted a photo of the shield, but I want to show the rest.

Years ago I made a core as part of a personal project that I never finished - the usual; over time you learn more and decide to make it from zero instead - and I ended up reusing it for a client from France.

The core is made with a series of yellow pine slats. The thickness of the layers is uniform: 2mm, but the central layer consists of only 9 wide slats, while the 2 outer layers are made of narrower slats. The cap slats of each horizontal layer are extra wide, just like the archaeological specimen from Egypt that I based it on. They are glued with white glue.

The handle is made from a solid piece of red oak, bent and placed at the geometric center of the shield, although the archaeological specimen had it offset 28mm upward. It is glued and nailed like the original, but based on another handle find from Dura Europos, Syria.

The front face was covered with a large horsehide and glued with hide glue heated in a double boiler. The rim is a strip cut from the leftover hide itself and is sewn with linen thread.

The wooden spina is also made from a single piece of pine and was nailed with 6 forged nails. These nails are bent over the back face of the shield and the tip is bent again to be driven back into the core.

The fittings on the back have also been forged according to those found on the original shield. They consist of an iron ring enclosed in an iron loop that goes through the core and is nailed in the same way as the spina nails. Through the rings runs a tight, hand-braided linen cord. The purpose of these fittings is multiple. The commonly associated function is to carry the shield on the back like a backpack, but there is another series of fittings intended to form a handle and, together with the rest, allow it to be wielded on the arm. This Thursday, 06/04/2026 (mm/dd/yyyy), I will publish an article about this on my page. I will update this post with the link.

As for the paint, it was made with hide glue. For the white (actually a light beige) I made a mixture of French chalk and an Italian earth. The blue was the result of mixing a modern synthetic blue with French chalk and magnetite. The paint covers the transport fittings, but they are still partially visible.

The dimensions are 128 x 70 cm and a palm's width in depth. Originally it was going to be 64 cm wide and a bit more than a palm's width deep, but the hide tends to flatten the shield. It weighs about 6 kg.

 

P.S. You are the first to see some of these photos. Not all of them will be published on my page until Thursday.

[pkinneb]

That's awesome!! Thanks for sharing.

[Von]

Very cool, thank you for sharing. If you have more pictures from the construction, I welcome seeing those.

 

[Sergio Escudero]

On 6/2/2026 at 9:35 PM, Von said:

Very cool, thank you for sharing. If you have more pictures from the construction, I welcome seeing those.

 

Unfortunately, I don't have any more. Years ago I used to make them and post them, but I stopped because in the end I wasn't interested, especially when certain people took advantage in bad faith.

[fcschoenthal]

On 6/2/2026 at 10:46 AM, Sergio Escudero said:

The thickness of the layers is uniform: 2mm, but the central layer consists of only 9 wide slats, while the 2 outer layers are made of narrower slats. The cap slats of each horizontal layer are extra wide, just like the archaeological specimen from Egypt that I based it on. They are glued with white glue.

Thanks so much for showing this and the background lesson. Personally, I have a couple of other questions:

1. Those are really thin layers at 2mm. How did they get them that thin?
2. You used white glue. Was hide glue originally used?
3. I'm assuming that in the bottom picture here, it's resting on the upside down bending form. That looks like a feat itself to make.

Again, very well done, thanks for sharing.

[Sergio Escudero]

On 6/2/2026 at 10:23 PM, fcschoenthal said:

Thanks so much for showing this and the background lesson. Personally, I have a couple of other questions:

1. Those are really thin layers at 2mm. How did they get them that thin?
2. You used white glue. Was hide glue originally used?
3. I'm assuming that in the bottom picture here, it's resting on the upside down bending form. That looks like a feat itself to make.

Again, very well done, thanks for sharing.

Hello. I used 2mm, but on other occasions I have used 1.3mm slats for the outer faces and 3mm as the maximum thickness for the central layer. Usually the finds we know show that the central layer used to be thicker than the outer ones. As for how they did it, it's a complete mystery, but I have my hypotheses. The most logical thing is to think that they would have devised some kind of frame to guide a saw, like a sort of miter box where the saw can only go forward and backward, in order to cut the slats lengthwise. Sometimes saw marks or marks from some type of tool can be seen on some surviving remains. These people were ingenious; rest assured that with the quantity they had to produce, the only viable way was to invent something similar.

Regarding the glue, in this case I used white glue for the wood because I had it already made that way years ago, but I also use hide glue (which needs to be heated in a double boiler and comes in pearls or dices) and casein glue made from milk, which I often make from raw materials. I have other shields in progress with casein glue. Archaeologically nothing has been proven because there are no conclusive chemical analyses, but Polybius talks about ox hide glue. For me, the problem is that gluing the wooden core with that implies a much longer, more expensive, and more tedious process than using a cold glue like casein, which seems to be attested as a binder for paint, and the production process is almost the same for making glue as it is for making a binder for painting. A cold glue that gives me a 20-30 minute working window helps me a lot.

If you look at one photo, the convex half appears, and in the other, the concave half. It takes work and you need to be precise when making it, but you need to do something like that to produce quality shields in mass quantities. They undoubtedly had something very similar or identical to mine.

[Mark J]

Very interesting!