Combat Archeology: Surface Mining & The Amber Problem by Mark Hatmaker

[The provided video will come into play in the second half of this essay. You’ll be prompted when to have a look.]


Studying old school ways of hurt can go by many names: Combat Archeology, Combat Re-Creation, Historical Resurrection, but no matter what you want to call it, the goal and spirit are the same.

We diggers in the past have beaucoup respect for old school tough, and if you’re anything like me, you’re more than a ‘Net-dabbler, or a mere copy-and-paster of what’s already been said by someone else. You drop money on the endeavor, you subscribe to numerous Historical Archive Societies, you keep your eye out for estate sales that might be pertinent to the facet of study. You test exhaustively via physical experimentation. You read anything and everything that is cogent, and you are even more deeply read in areas that seem tangential as often, like panning for gold, the dust downstream tells you there’s a good spot for a placer-mine somewhere upstream. 


[See Jack London’s “All Gold Canyon” for the fictional heft behind that metaphor, or Vardis Fisher & Opal Laurel Holmes’ exhaustive non-fiction take Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West. You see what I mean? You gotta dig anywhere and everywhere, cuz’, who knows?]


Anything that does not resemble deep digging may result in a bit of superficial dust. Oh, a nugget or two may turn up now and again, but the deeper you dig the more you recognize a true vein of knowledge and develop a bit of an educated eye as to whether you are shoveling true or filling your sacks with fool’s gold.


All the aforementioned is the “surface mining” problem.


Let’s move on to the Amber Problem.


You are likely aware that we have perfectly preserved prehistoric insect specimens encased in amber, a fossilized resin of coniferous trees from the Tertiary period. These specimens are marvels to behold. A mosquito in amber becomes the launching point of Michael Crichton’s influential novel Jurassic Park.


The Amber Problem as it relates to today’s lesson is this, we may be able to see in perfect detail the vast majority of the insect’s anatomy, but this in no way shows us the specimen in action, in flight, as it crawled across a leaf, as it palpated with antennae waiting for the cloud to pass by the sun’s life-giving rays. 


We can assume we know just how it moved by comparing it with how we observe insects move today, and in many respects that may very well be on the nose. 


But, in some respects it may not be. What details might we be overlooking because we can “see it in such great detail”?


Let’s have a look at the provided video. In it I am discussing with a Boot Camp cadre a follow-up submission from the old-school top-wristlock. 


Now, this video is, well, video and not a still photo, not an isolated woodcut, or a painting found in an old book. By dint of seeing movement we should be less susceptible to the Amber Problem.


Likely video is always a better transmission than stills or frozen insects but bear with me. 


If you’ve had a look at the video might I add aspects that are not necessarily mentioned, and keep in mind I am intending to instruct in the video clip. The details that follow were not “held-back” or kept on the hush-hush, or even negligently neglected, they were simply by-products of the Amber Problem.


To the video…

·        In the video I mention “Use the man, not the mat” but fail to demonstrate it. That demonstration preceded this video snapshot. Just as with our insect in amber, we see perfectly what he looks like the moment he was preserved in amber but have no clue as to his posture the moments just before being frozen for all time.

·        I mention the grip using a wrist-flex, and a bit of “throttling” but what is not seen are the thumbs of any hand that touches the opponent. Never a thumb-pad, always a thumb-tip with a reinforced dig.

·        We know the elbows are in “kindness position” as mentioned and we are by-passing “man not the mat” but they still adhere to “The Battler’s Box.” That is the 12” cinch that freezes the joint before you go to work on it.

·        We see the hip-side cut off of the cross-body, but we cannot see the steady, hard static lateral tensing from hip flexor through obliques to lats, or the tension load that powers the hip-cut. This is anything but static or placid.

There are three more “Amber” points I could mention, I leave them to you or another day to mine, but the point is even when we have a seemingly perfect “view” of an insect, of a tactic, of an idea we may actually only have one brief moment in the life of that insect and that view may tell us very little of the tale.


The deeper we dig, the better miners we are likely to become.


The more we chip at the amber and get at the DNA of the mosquito or the bad-boy tactic of the past the better able we are to resurrect our own modern-day velociraptors.


We must skip scratching at surfaces and assuming the static is a stand-in for the fluid. Or that knowledge is two-dimensional.


Playing the historical game properly moves your perceived velociraptors from mere CGI constructs to vicious, tearing predators.


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