page_title: Ballista
section_title: Archaeology and the Roman ballista
hierarchical_section_title: Ballista / Roman weaponry / Archaeology and the Roman ballista
caption_attribution_description: IV A.D. Balista exposed in Cluj History Museum. Balista was found at Dierna castra in the Romanian city of Orșova in Mehedinți County.
context_page_description: The ballista, plural ballistae, sometimes called bolt thrower, was an ancient missile weapon that launched either bolts or stones at a distant target.
  Developed from earlier Greek weapons, it relied upon different mechanics, using two levers with torsion springs instead of a tension prod. The springs consisting of several loops of twisted skeins. Early versions projected heavy darts or spherical stone projectiles of various sizes for siege warfare. It developed into a smaller precision weapon, the scorpio, and possibly the polybolos.
context_section_description: Archaeology, and in particular experimental archaeology has been influential on this subject. Although several ancient authors (such as Vegetius) wrote very detailed technical treatises, providing us with all the information necessary to reconstruct the weapons, all their measurements were in their native language and therefore highly difficult to translate.
  Attempts to reconstruct these ancient weapons began at the end of the 19th century, based on rough translations of ancient authors. It was only during the 20th century, however, that many of the reconstructions began to make any sense as a weapon. By bringing in modern engineers, progress was made with the ancient systems of measurement. By redesigning the reconstructions using the new information, archaeologists in that specialty were able to recognize certain finds from Roman military sites, and identify them as ballistae. The information gained from the excavations was fed into the next generation of reconstructions and so on.
  Sites across the empire have yielded information on ballistae, from Spain (the Ampurias Catapult), to Italy (the Cremona Battleshield, which proved that the weapons had decorative metal plates to shield the operators), to Iraq (the Hatra Machine) and even Scotland (Burnswark siege tactics training camp), and many other sites between.
  The most influential archaeologists in this area have been Peter Connolly and Eric Marsden, who have not only written extensively on the subject but have also made many reconstructions themselves and have refined the designs over many years of work.
caption: Metal components of a 4th-century ballista
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