Editing Camouflage (section)

==== Before 1800 ====

[[File:Museum für Antike Schifffahrt, Mainz 02. Spritsail.jpg|thumb|Roman ships, depicted on a 3rd-century AD [[sarcophagus]] ]]

Ship camouflage was occasionally used in ancient times. [[Philostratus]] ({{Circa|172–250 AD}}) wrote in his ''[[Imagines (work by Philostratus)|Imagines]]'' that Mediterranean pirate ships could be painted blue-gray for concealment.{{sfn|Casson|1995|pages=211–212}} [[Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus|Vegetius]] ({{circa|360–400&nbsp;AD}}) says that "Venetian blue" (sea green) was used in the [[Gallic Wars]], when [[Julius Caesar]] sent his ''speculatoria navigia'' (reconnaissance boats) to gather intelligence along the coast of Britain; the ships were painted entirely in bluish-green wax, with sails, ropes and crew the same colour.{{sfn|Casson|1995|page=235}} There is little evidence of military use of camouflage on land before 1800, but two unusual ceramics show men in [[Peru]]'s [[Mochica]] culture from before 500&nbsp;AD, hunting birds with blowpipes which are fitted with a kind of shield near the mouth, perhaps to conceal the hunters' hands and faces.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Jett |first=Stephen C. |date=March 1991 |title=Further Information on the Geography of the Blowgun and Its Implications for Early Transoceanic Contacts |journal=Annals of the Association of American Geographers |volume=81 |issue=1 |pages=89–102 |jstor=2563673 |doi=10.1111/j.1467-8306.1991.tb01681.x}}</ref> Another early source is a 15th-century French manuscript, ''The Hunting Book of Gaston Phebus'', showing a horse pulling a cart which contains a hunter armed with a crossbow under a cover of branches, perhaps serving as a hide for shooting game.<ref>{{cite book |title=The Crossbow |url=https://archive.org/details/TheCrossbowMediaevalAndModern |publisher=Longmans, Green |last=Payne-Gallwey |first=Ralph |year=1903 |page=[https://archive.org/details/TheCrossbowMediaevalAndModern/page/n43 11]}}</ref> [[Jamaican Maroons]] are said to have used plant materials as camouflage in the [[First Maroon War]] ({{circa|1655–1740}}).<ref>{{cite book |last=Saunders |first=Nicholas |title=The People of the Caribbean: An Encyclopedia of Archaeology and Traditional Culture |year=2005 |publisher=ABC-CLIO}}</ref>