#33 - Scale Armor Reflections and Future

 My first published work was about a set of armor, “Scale Armor on the North American Frontier: Lessons from the John G. Bourke Armor.” It was published in Plains Anthropologist in 2015 and was a collaborative effort between myself, my undergraduate mentor Dr. Peter Bleed, my twin sister Jessica, our fabrics expert Madeleine Roberg, and our metal expert David Killick. The project was facilitated through the UCARE program at my university, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a program that awarded funding to undergraduate projects. 

I have written about the article before (see post #13), but I wanted to revisit it, as it seems to be pretty popular. But I also wanted to take some time to reflect about the project now that I have a greater distance from it and much, much more experience in the fields of research and writing. 

As a quick recap, the armor was found in the collections of the Nebraska History Museum. They had very little information about it except for paperwork tracing the provenance back to John G. Bourke, who acquired the armor during military service in the Southwest United States in the early 1870s. Since my twin and I both had work study employment at the Museum, they recruited us and our mentor Dr. Peter Bleed to do some research. We pursued many avenues of inquiry - was the armor from Spanish conquistadors? Was it part of a 19th century operatic costume? Was it Freemasons?! We were able to get a scale of the armor and a scrap of fabric analyzed, metallurgical testing showed the scales were made of bloomery iron which was pretty impure and coarse while radiocarbon dating provided us with a very unhelpful statistical range of something like 1650-1950AD. We managed to track down some sources that showed the potential for other theories. Another set of scales had been found in the same general area as ours, but these were disarticulated. They matched the size of our scales remarkably well, but the paper published about them was also inconclusive in their conclusions. We then were contacted by someone in possession of drawings from the frontier in the mid-1800s showing Pawnee warriors, some of whom are wearing clothing with scale-like patterns. Our conclusion, then, was that perhaps the armor was manufactured in the mid-1850s on the frontier for Native American warriors to use in battle. But we really reached no conclusion.

I have learned so much since working on this project, not so much about armor or the frontier, but about how to do history, how to use different different types of sources, and how our work may have unintentionally left some important things out. This is not about ‘wish I had done’ or ‘if one I had thought to,’ I believe that nothing is ever really finished. There are always more sources to find, different views to understand, etc. I have always hoped to return to the scale armor and try to write a follow up. 

Namely, I want to see the disarticulated set of armor in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I want to be able to confirm that the Nebraska set and the New York set are similar enough to compare and write about together. One set could be seen as an anomaly, but two could start to establish a pattern. I want to reach out to the authors of “A New World Find of European Scale Armor,” Hugh Rogers and Donald Larocca to see if they have any new insights. 

I also want to investigate drawings of Native Americans like the examples of the Pawnee warriors. They were painted by fellow Pawnee and could even be self-portraits. We did not really research this aspect since we discovered it so late in the writing process. But I think there could be physical, written, or even oral accounts of armor worn by Native Americans during the mid-19th century that could be used to help understand my armor. I feel like using indigenous, contemporary accounts was not as popular when I was an undergrad as they are now. They also have become much more accessible through digitization efforts.

I also want to research more about the practice of 19th century soldiers collecting artifacts from the frontier. If Bourke found the armor in the 1870s, it wouldn’t have been very old at the time since the Pawnee drawings are from the 1850s or so. Did soldiers create ‘curiosities,’ or were they sold objects in some sort of tourist trap shop? Also, I believe that I may be able to find a crossover with my Rensselaerville Letters Projects; one of the boys was assigned to the Kansas Territory after the Civil War and traveled into Texas. I wonder if Charles Niles ever met John Bourke? 

It's just such an interesting object. What in the world was any metal armor, let alone scale armor doing in the desert of Arizona?! If there is any chance my armor could be from a Spanish explorer, I’d also love to research more into expeditions and the presence of Spanish soldiers in the area. And why scales? Why not banded armor like the Romans used, which would give similar protection from weapons and the heat? 

When we were conducting the project, I took on the hands-on part of photographing and creating a ‘site plan’ of the scales. I became very familiar with its construction and form while my sister and our mentor focused more on the textual sources. I was very much an archaeology student at the time, so I was primarily interested in learning what the armor itself could tell me rather than evidence and paths of research around it. But since then my historical and research experience has expanded into finding hints and tips in varied sources and fields of study. I understand a lot more how different tools from different disciplines can lend different and useful insights to a research question. I think there is space to write something more about the frontier in the 19th century using the Bourke and MET armors as the focus. Just like I hope to eventually do with the Ryves Holt House, I would want to use the armors as objects that can bridge the divide between the reader and history.

...And it may be a bit nerdy, but I would also dearly love to recreate the armor with modern materials. There has got to be some scholarly benefit to having a facsimile. Right?