[ulfberth]

Hi Marcus,

thank you for showing us helmets of the same period to compare with.
It does happen and has happened before that auction houses mistakenly label good authentic pieces as 19th C.
That being said, the bigger or more experienced the auction house has, the less this happens.
Looking closely at the helmets presented it seems there are some differences in the impact / pattern strikes .
Most of them have a around dozen of these impact and are different in shape, none have all the same looking impact marks.
The place were these marks visible on the helmets as presented here are in the neck area or the place were a sword blow would have been deflected to in case of a frontal blow.
On the Maximilian Helmet I easily count around 50 impact marks, they all seem to come from the same object the only difference is that some are deeper than others. What concerns me more is that they are structural divided over the whole helmet and appear in places were this helmet would in most cases deflect a hit or blow.
I think we can rule out sword blows completely as many of these strike marks are in the deeper part of the gully or groove.
These impact marks look like they are made by a hammer.
They don't seem to come from a war hammer but rather from the back of a modern hammer.
They have a repetitive similarity,when they were inflected concerning : force , angle, shape of the object and distance , all these circumstances together would be impossible in battle.
In my opinion , the battle blows you see on the other helmets was exactly what they were trying to mimic, but they over did it.
I hate to visualize the situation, a nutcase with other intentions hammering from a distance of 50 CM an otherwise beautiful handmade helmet.
Of course I would like to hear other thoughts as well.

kind regards

Ulfberth