Experimental archeology is very "in" right now. There is much to be learned about how ancient cultures did things by actually getting out there and trying to do it.
The guy at the bottom is a history major and a warrior buff. This is part of his research in experimental archeology. You are right about it.
A Houston man who became a devotee of edged weapons spent years relearning the fighting skills of European swordsmen.....practiced with everything from 1-1/2 handers and bastard swords to the huge two-handed swords used by German Landsknechts under the Hapsburg emperors 500 years ago, to Scottish claymores to rapiers to sabers to epees. His conclusion was that European swordfighting was a truly deadly art in few ways inferior to Japanese swordsmanship, but that it declined severely in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries as the firelock gradually became the queen of the battlefield.
This guy still runs the European equivalent of a dojo for swordsmen. He was written up in Houston's alternative paper, The Houston Press, a few years ago.
Yup, and a lot of things that were always dismissed as "impossible" for that culture to do have turned out to be not only possible, but easy.