Hello and welcome everyone to a new ancient warfare magazine podcast. I am joined tonight by Mark, Mark, Murray, and Lindsay.

And we're all going to talk about reenactment and experimental archaeology and what we can learn from that and where the limits are

and what is good and maybe not so good about it and we might have opinions but we only have one person with some experience

I don't count myself the photos are somewhere online but well betide the person who tries and find them um

and we've got quite a few questions that we um we could work off of i've grouped them a little bit

um i think let's let's talk about the the most uh perhaps the most attractive the most obvious aspect of uh reenactment and that is you know

how does it help to generate interest and educating the public is an easy gimme uh lindsay you've

you've done it how does the public react when you show up in roman gear well well it's interesting

it depends on the country you do it in actually uh so i was a member of the irma street guard so

plug for ermis street guard there's the badge there the most famous british uh reenactment group

that you usually see on on shows it was found in 1972. It's had a very, very long distinguished history.

Chris Haynes, I think it's OBE now, actually heads it up.

The reaction of the audience is typically, one filled with slight awe.

It comes down to how you do the performance.

So an OMA Street Guard performance consists of a sort of lecture, if you will, and it's a

very well-organized explanation of what the Legion is, the arms of equipment. Of course, the joke is that

ladies in the audience might like to grab themselves a Roman soldier and examine his arms and

equipment. It always gets a titter.

And then you go into a sort of formation drill and the final thing ends up with a cuneum, a charge using the wedge formation, which is precision ballet, if you will, because

we just stop before we actually crash into the audience.

Hopefully without anybody stumbling. Hopefully without anybody's stumbling.

Well, that's exactly right.

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