TDR, let's talk primitive weapons

[Deleted]

Well then, that's not NEARLY as impressive VI


I used to shoot clays, kinda got out of it a decade or so ago though. I rarely hunt anythng but deer anymore.

[Cribbs]

Lakeside, I shoot clay pigeons all the time. I just shot in a sporting clays tournament Saturday in Georgia and it was one of the toughest courses I have ever shot.

I finished with a 37 out of 50. Man, it was tough. I try to shoot every Tuesday night in a club tournament here, and about 7-10 sanctioned tournaments each year.

Great fun. I highly recommend you try it. Either sporting clays or skeet, but DO IT!

[TDR]

Hi VI,

I still bowhunt, but I gave in to high tech a while back and use a compound and aluminum arrows with razor points. I feel confident in my shot to 45 yards and might take a 55 sometimes.

With the old 60 lb recurve it was cedar arrows and really 35 was the outside shot, with a lot less penetration. 25 and under was the sure shot, and you need to be in a blind on a water hole or a bait to get that one.

A buddy of mine got me into knapping points. We have a good source of obsidian around here, which chips to surgical sharp cutting edges. With some practice you can make some fine looking arrowheads and spear points.

A good indian type bow is harder than it looks. Not so many types of wood are springy enough. The right yew or osage isn't too bad, and you can back it with sinew for more strength. But they still don't last near as well a modern materials, its gonna break on you. The longbow design is older and simpler. A good short recurve is handy, specially on horseback, but it takes more doing to get any power out of it.

I have a friend here who makes "authentic replica" reproductions of arrow types used by various native American tribes. Incredible how much time goes into a single arrow. His get mounted in a display frame with a little historical blurb to go with. I understand some are in the Smithsonian musem.

Bunch of rendezvous gatherings out this way too, from Feb to Oct, and they are a hoot cuz of the characters and the events.

[andrewg]

Archery is a love of mine. I shoot a Hoyt Gold Medallist recurve bow, or did, until I screwed up my left elbow and was dropped from the county championships. My bow is now gathering dust.
I really miss shooting at targets. You'd be surprised how small a gold is at 100 meters.

[Village Idiot]

Archery is a fine thing. I've got a 65 pound recurve, but am reduced to haybales, as my wife in an anti-hunter.

A person can find arrowheads around here, but the assumption is that they were from the west, as flint, which is what they mostly are, and the occasional obsidian couldn't have been made here. That says a lot for the amount of trade and communication that must have gone on in the ancient Americas.

Interesting thing about east Africa: Their bows are small, don't have much pull, and are built more like a long bow. The energy comes out of the poison used, not the thrust.

I would assume that what was traded was the rocks, not the finished product. Hunting arrowheads was something I did before most farmers started going no till, and fields were plowed, exposing them. On occasion I'd find an arrowhead surrounded by chips of the rock is was formed from, or a mis-shapen one that no one would have carried that far to trade.

Obsidian is a very common stone in east Africa, although my Dad or I never found any arrowheads. On the other hands, small chunks of iron could also be found on the ground, suggesting that the Iron Age came sooner to Africa than it did to the Americas.

I showed the neighbor kid, a 17-year-old, how to string a recurve bow last week. Things were fine until he started pulling back and letting it go without an arrow, I'm lucky he didn't shatter the thing. I was glad, though, to give him the opportunity to see what a recurve is like.

[Tamarack]

A geologist just can't resist chiming in here. Obsidian in Iowa would have been traded from much further west -- it is a volcanic glass that would have come from Idaho, Montana, or further west. Flint, a.k.a chert, is abundant within limestones in southern Iowa. When I lived in Missouri I did a lot of drilling in a soybean field next to two Indian mounds. The ground was littered with flint chips and we would occasionally find an arrowhead or spear point. I have a piece of knapped flint that was either a knife or spear point gone bad.

[TDR]

I would assume that what was traded was the rocks, not the finished product.

I would assume they'd trade finished product. If it takes a hundred pouds of rock to make 20 ls of points, you aren't gonna haul 100 lbs of rock from Wyoming to Iowa.

There are places around here, caves and the shores of ancient lakes, that are good for arrowhead hunting. Its technically illegal, specially from caves and archaelogic camp sites.

One memorable find had a collectin of leaf points, very artfully made, in a stash in a cave. Its amazing to think those folks had no iron, basically a stone age technology, but they were able to survive and cover the continent and even trade over huge distances.