We recreated a Gladiator Helmet. Here's what we learnt.

Michael Neilson has worked as a Replication Specialist at The British Museum for 29 years. He has created copies of cuneiform tablets, the Rosetta Stone, and many other notable museum objects. For the “Gladiators of Britain” exhibition, he was tasked with creating a reconstruction of The Hawkedon Helmet, the only Roman Gladiator helmet to be found in Britain.

Watch Mike break down the process of crafting a helmet that includes various techniques that would have been available to ancient Roman metalworkers. By studying clues found on an ancient gladiator helmet, he attempts to recreate it as it might have actually looked 2,000 years ago.

00:00 Intro
01:22 Assessing The Hawkedon Helmet
04:21 Shaping the bronze sheet
06:57 Annealing of metal
08:00 Unusual shape of the helmet
08:48 Assessing the brow bar
10:15 Prototyping the brow bar
10:35 Creating a mould
10:57 Casting the brow bar
12:27 Making the eye guards
13:28 Trim of the visor
14:54 Making the rivet
15:36 Tinning the bronze
17:18 The complete helmet

Special thanks to The Crucible Foundry for their support on this project.

You can see the original Hawkedon Helmet, along with the reconstructed face guard, at the British Museum Partnership Exhibition ‘Gladiators of Britain,’ on display at Grosvenor Museum, Chester, from 20 September, followed by Tullie, Carlisle from 7 February 2026.
Find out more here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/gladiators

Image attributions:

Gladitorial Helmet, Pompei @ 01:52 - Gladiatorial Helmet. Object is part of the collection of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli

House of the Gladiators @ 09:37 - Carole Raddato (2015). CC-BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons

Collared Slaves @ 13:15 - Relief with three registers of slaves in chains and animals © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford