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Originally Posted by Matchlock
Thank you, Fernando,
Actually it was our member Zwielicht, who gave me the impulse to leaf thru literally everything I had.
The main problem with so little and barren information as we have is that the museums do not provide us with the knowledge that we are entitled of.
After all, these objects do not solely belong to the institutions that preserve them - they actually belong to all of us, and in my mind, they especially belong to the tiny but devoted community of students and scholars outside the museums who really are the ones that get going academic research the best they can!!!
I realize it's a very sad topic, and I can hear museum people holler, "we just don't have the time to do that, we are completely overworked ...". Well, I'have heard them bring forward that argument for more than 30 years, and believe me, friend, I'm fed up with it. I don't make half the money they do and I'm struggling for financial survival as all the jack I ever made is stuck in my collection, but I dedicated my life to A&A research more than half a century ago. And I God knows I have felt, and tried to comply with, the responsibility to support everybody showing serious interest ever since.
Anyway, I really feel like this is a topic our new member Armbrust might be willing to contribute to.  
What I am trying to convey is that it is only working and researching together that any progress can be made by. Anybody walking alone on this hardly plowed field is bound to face isolation, frustration and standstill before long.
Anyways, best for tonight to everybody,
Michael |
Very well said Michael!!!!!
The bureaucracy and capitulation of many museums (and I would emphasize the word many....certainly not all
to the financially charged pressures and ajendas of benefactors has often rendered them virtually absentee in the advance of knowledge in the study of historical arms. Even one of the largest museums here has candidly admitted that they prefer not to display weapons due to the 'political and moral complications'.
Many museums have actually pulled down and stored weapons displays in this same sense.
What they do not realize is that arms and armour are a dynamic icon of mankinds history that reflected more than thier admittedly grim purpose.
They also have forever imbued in them the essence of those who made them and used them in the monumental struggle for survival. These items have often survived as well, as they have been afforded respect and even reverence by those who knew them, and fascination and intrigue by those who have encountered and held them in later times.
Every weapon is patinated with history in some degree, and often in dimensions we cannot imagine....and we as historians are charged with finding ways for them to share thier secrets, and preserving thier history. ...lest we forget the valor with which they typically were used.
Naturally, there will be the instances where many weapons became associated with quite the contrary, but as always, they became simply instruments of negative forces,and remain historical curiosities in the spectrum of humanity.
All very best regards,
Jim