| T. Kew wrote: |
| As I understand the thread of Dan's argument - and with apologies to him if I get it wrong:
1. Most mail which has survived from most periods of history is round-riveted. |
Actually most "surviving" European mail is not round riveted. If you have not seen my Pinterest image gallery of European mail then it is a good place to start, see how many round riveted European mail examples you can identify.
http://www.pinterest.com/worldantiques/european-mail-armor/
Here is an example of what round riveted links look like.
[ Linked Image ]
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| 2. Most mail is also hard to precisely date or localise, so it's hard to be specific. |
This is true for European mail, mail from other cultures can be much easier to identiry, There have been very few research studies on this subject. There are some records on orders placed for European mail and what country it was ordered from. The origin of some European mail is known due to who owned it etc.
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| 3. Some samples of existing mail have signed rings which let us localise them |
Some examples of German mail have makers rings, the vast majority of European mail that I have seen has no identification.[/quote]
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| 4. Some samples of existing mail are made of wedge riveted links, not round riveted. |
The majority of images publically available of European mail that can be identified are wedge riveted, many images are not clear or detailed enough to tell anything about the mail.
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| 5. All of our samples from the intersection of those two categories are from southern Germany. |
I am not sure what you are saying here, what two categories?
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| Therefore, until we can precisely guarantee that a given wedge-riveted shirt wasn't made in southern Germany, we should assume all wedge riveted mail was. |
So if you had a shipment of oranges from many different places and only a few boxs were labled "Germany" you would have to say that all of the oranges came from "Germany"?
How about not "assuming anything, how about looking at the evidence and making a decision based on what is before us. Some German wedge riveted mail was marked, otherwise there are no identifying makers marks, unless someone has some sort of proof that no other European mail making country in the world ever produced wedge riveted mail then why would you say that.
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| It seems quite solid as a thread of logic - while we might assume it's reasonable that the Italians also made wedge riveted mail, if our only verifiable examples are from Germany, we should take that as a starting point. |
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