Assembling the shaft grave helmet

Nearly complete shaft grave helmet, with its outer shell in place.

At this point the helmet looks finished, and it nearly is, but it doesn't yet have a felt liner.  Just like the Phaistos helmet, the leather components are stitched together with strong linen thread.  The joins are covered in red felt, which acts a little like a gasket and hides any places where the joins are a bit scruffy.

In this case the helmet shell consists of a conical top piece, and two curved cylinders studded with metal discs and stuffed with linen (see my first post on the shaft grave helmet for a cross sectional diagram).  I had a long think about whether I should glue the linen and then decided not to.  Aldrete et al, who quite literally wrote the book on linen armour, found the linen layers didn't necessarily have to be glued together.  The important thing is that you have a lot of layers of springy stuff to absorb the impact of any blows you receive.  Schlieman did recover a small fragment of linen armour from shaft grave V, which consisted of 14 layers and may have been part of a linothorax, but I don't know whether the layers had been glued or not.  It may not have been possible to tell.  Greece really does not provide good conditions for the preservation of organic material; even the skeletons in the shaft graves were not very complete.

In any case I found it was easy enough just to stuff the linen in there, so this helmet is padded with layers of unglued linen strips.

Helmet shell with linen padding inside.

Where the stitching holes are visible I've made them the historical way, with an awl, but many of the holes are covered by felt binding so I cheated on those and used a metal punch.  This is a punch designed to make holes in steel plate, and it is the easiest way of making holes in armour leather.  It's not historically accurate, but I find by the time I've bored a few dozen holes in 5mm armour leather with an awl I don't really care.  If you look closely at the holes it is possible to see they were made with a punch, so I do make sure I only use it on holes that will be covered.

The holes you can see here were made with an awl.

A note about the metal studs you can see in these pictures: they are made from a modern ferrous alloy instead of bronze, but they look like bronze age helmet studs.  They're fixed to the leather with a pin in the back.  Studs like these have been found in bronze age burials, but I'm not aware of any studs with pins from the Mycenaean shaft graves.  There are small bronze discs that may have been used to reinforce helmets, but they have perforations around the edges and were sewn onto whatever they were attached to.  Assuming they were helmet reinforcements, this makes me wonder whether the helmet shell might have been covered in linen (or other textile), with the discs sewn onto that.  It would even be possible to make the shell for one of these helmets entirely out of laminated linen instead of leather.