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Utah Juniper - limb vs trunk wood

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Marin:
And if I may also note, an ethnographic source within that article even says that some northern Paiute informants said they only ever used juniper trunk wood and not branch wood when making bows......which confuses me quite a bit.

willie:
maybe there is a comparision to be looked at in different bow designs, where some bows use a lesser amount of sinew, maybe just enought to keep the back from blowing on a mostly wood bow, (small game type?  trunk wood?)

as compared to highly sinewed bowdesign where a more suitable but challenging stave is called for?
(big game? or limb wood?)   just guessing here,


Were any of the researchers bowyers?, and even if they were would it be acceptable to speculate in a scientific paper?

Marin:
None of the researchers were, but I'm just looking at the data. Like where wer ethe stave scars found, and almost all of them are found on trunks, very rarely on the sky side of large limbs.
But at the same time, maybe if a branch was used it would have just been sawed//chiseled off entirely leaving no scar. Maybe trunk wood would be a last resort? And so many bows would have been made at that point in history, maybe there just wasn't that many branches left in some areas and they had to resort to trunk wood.
And still, there's that tidbit from the Northern Paiute informant about the fact they only used trunk wood and not branch wood.....All I can assume was it was a single guy's preference that got extrapolated as being the preference for all Paiute bowmakers?
This is of course all speculation, I have only ever worked with juniper branch wood, so all I was curious if anyone else has had experience with juniper.

willie:
juniper sinew site:http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/

paste the above search term into google, also

http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts;u=7503

Marin:
Thanks willie, I’ll look through these.
I guess there no conclusive answer so maybe I’ll experiment myself….
If anyone else does eventually come across this thread would love to hear their thoughts as well if they’ve experimented or played around with this already.

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