[Lee]

I believe that the post 1900 / 100 year old "cutoff" may have been Fernando's personal "rule of thumb" in moderating the European Arsenal section of the forum. Life is better for all when members of the moderation team are allowed reasonable latitude. Personally, I'd classify a British Brown Bess, a British model 1796 cavalary saber and a model 1860 U.S. cavalry saber all as militaria. A reworking of any of these within another culture might surely create an ethnographic weapon character and discussion in the forum may also be relevant to considerations in the "evolution" of ethnographic types and the martial environment they existed in.

I started out as a militaria collector. In suburban middle America of the 1960s and 70s this is where one's opportunities were going to lie. I avoided contributing to the current "Arms Collecting and Nostalgia" thread because how my interest in European medieval arms initially arose is a bit embarrassing. Even as I focused on European medieval swords, I would occasionally find interesting and analogous metalworking techniques in edged weapons from many cultures and times and I began collecting these. Decent examples were relatively inexpensive in the 1980s and 90s.

I discovered the internet during this phase and this project began being about European medieval swords. Much of the interest in discussion groups then was very much of the "collect all of the Oakeshott types in modern mass-produced replica form." Bored during a clinical chemistry conference irrelevant to my work, my mind began to drift and that is when I wrote the paragraph quoted above in my previous post and conceived the ethnographic part of this web project. With more than a little bit of arrogance and presumptiveness I took it upon myself to suggest that aspiring collectors should focus on something that I considered worthwhile and meriting their attentions and that if they did not have the luck and resources to pursue authentic medieval European swords, then there still were ingenuously and proficiently handmade antique arms and armour from other times and places languishing at gun shows and antique shops that could be had for very reasonable prices.

From when I started going to the Baltimore show decades ago, I remembered an intriguing and detailed educational display of Philippine edged weapons. The next year I earnestly looked for it, but it was gone. On a snack break I saw someone with some Philippine items and offhandedly lamented to him that I had missed the amazing display from the previous year. He replied that it had been his, but that influential members of the gun collecting and dealing fraternity had declared it a waste of scarce display space. I heard the same sentiment from some gun and militaria dealers I knew as well. Well, if they can be narrow minded jerks, so can I.

Relatedly, a word on the absolute hostility towards commerce in our discussion forums and the tight restrictions even in the swap forums. This is probably best explained with an analogy: consider a garden where you are attempting to grow some fastidious plants, here representing the sharing of knowledge and appreciation of ethnographic arms and armour. Commerce represents weeds in that sharing of knowledge may be seen as giving up commercial advantage in the market. Against the alternative of "wheeling and dealing" and acquiring, the pursuit of knowledge will be pushed aside. Consider the annual Ethnographic Arms and Armour dinner and lectures seminar that we held each year to coincide with the Baltimore show over a decade ago. This thrived until an antique arms and armour auction came to be held in the same hotel also on Saturday evening - when the auction started, the seminar room thinned out quickly and to such an extent that the the seminar series was abandoned just a few years later. Most "antique arms collector" groups in the US are in fact, in my opinion, essentially dealer organizations. This is surely not to say that I have not known and appreciated dealers who have nurtured my connoisseurship and knowledge, but they are the best and the exceptions. My hope here has been that by rigorously combating such weeds, the forum will be and remain a place where we can all share our knowledge, insights and enthusiasm for the subject.