Primitive Archer
Main Discussion Area => Bows => Topic started by: sleek on January 23, 2016, 02:11:25 pm
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So im taking a knee with my KaBar and working some elm into a Choctaw bow. I got it floor bending and this is where i change my choping motion from large chunks to smaller ones. This leaves a series of many many small gouged sections of wood where chips have been removed not unlike knapped flint. As i go further i make my chips even smaller to make a smoother surface until during final tillering, i turn from choping to s raping with the knife. I can almost always get a machine smooth surface like this.
Ow my question is this. Do yall know if the natives did similar work or if the just chopped and left tool marks on the belly? I know i can tiller a bow all the way without ever using the knife as a scraper and would be quicker, and get the same tiller. Often after chopping through a hard white wood the edge is too dull to scrape well and i hit it with a stone. I wonder if the natives avoided that and just chopped through their work without a concern to a nice smooth finish? A chopped surface has a certain appeal to me as well when the chop marks are small and close with an even patern.
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The bows in the Encyclopedia by Hamm and Allely give that answer. You can't assume one particular tool was used. A chopped surface is not going to be a well tillered surface.
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I don't know but I know that the natives used sandstone to smoothen out their staves. Otis the Iceman's bow had tool marks on it but they think it was an unfinished bow. I would smoothen out the tool marks just in case.
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I'm sure a bow was a source of pride and most would have the best workmanship they could do
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Nearly all the examples I have looked at were heavily burnished back and belly.
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lots of stone scrapers have been found. I have several. They would be harder than your knife and easy to sharpen.
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I once went to Harvard's Peabody Museum and saw many well crafted native bows. If I remember they were very well done. Jawge
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They often sanded with horsetail from what I understand. It is one of the few(if not only) plant with high amounts of silica in it. I think a rough surface would be an inconvenience. It could snag on anything from it's own case to a ponies mane. I would image after a couple days of that they put in the effort to smooth it.
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The subject line on this thread caught my eye. I was recently thinking about this same topic, only in a slightly different way. There was a time in which I held the idea that American Indian archery equipment was quintessential. I held the view that they had figured out all there was to know about building the perfect bow. After all, they were “one with nature”, right? Over the years, my views have certainly changed. There came a point at which I realized how similar they were to people today. There were masters of the art, and rank armatures. Most were somewhere in between. Some of them could make a masterpiece out of the poorest of wood choices, and others could take a great piece of wood and ruin it. I have seen some exceptional bows, highly burnished and exquisitely decorated. I have also seen some that look pretty rough. There is a bow at the Fort Croghan museum in Burnet, Texas that is made of bois d’ arc. It is almost black in color because of age. I’m sure it was serviceable in its day, but it has chips and tear outs all along both limbs. I wish I had a photo of it, and will try to get one someday. I am including a photo of a Southern Cheyenne bow from the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). I am just posting a couple of close ups of one limb. This was a usable bow for someone at one time. I used to spend most of my time looking for the nicest beadwork, the best tanned and painted robes, the nicest archery gear, etc. Now I like looking for the stuff that has flaws in it. I still like seeing the nice stuff in museums, but nowadays I have a much greater appreciation for the stuff of the common guy. Curtis
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i think what we see in a museum is such a small percentage of the thousands of bows made, that it would be hard to judge from such a small information base,, :)
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Until reading this post, I would not have thought about putting value on preserving the full spectrum, that is, we can learn from seeing the average, the great, and the bad. I have always thought of rating quality like: poor, average, good, excellent, and museum grade. In other words, until this post, I would have thought that only the best and highest quality items deserved to be in a museum. I wonder if others have thought the same?
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I would imagine the museum would display the best example that could be found of that item. In some case those items are one of a kind or at least there are very few examples to choose from.
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At the Peabody Museum I was trying to see the Sudbury bow but that was by appointment only and I did not have enough time to hang around.
I thought the term "museum grade" was for replicas. I also did not think that museums were choosy about authentic bows.
When I went to the Smithsonian they had no bows. I asked them why and they said that none were available.
Jawge
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someone here on PA one time said they found / seen a bow at a museum that had beaver teeth marks still on the belly (beaver teeth used to tiller), make it work not pretty. Ed
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Having never been to a museum with any archery stuff I'm wondering if replicas are always clearly marked as such or does that depend on the museum?
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i seen a post with a bow that was said to belong to Techumseh, that bow in that picture is a piece of art. id even recon it never was shot.i know id just carry it around for ohhs and ahhs. lol, then in that book that encyclopidia of bows book, i seen a hickory bow, kind of ruff looking, cut through the rings here and there, but looked like a bow that one would shoot, get the job done and not worry about it. i like bows somewhere in between. not too pretty but not so violated it will last only a short time.im thinking that most folks back then were more concerned with dinner and staying alive than something pretty. but there were leaders who had to dress the part you might say. im sure these guys had the finest made pieces.you couple that with the idea that some were great craftsmen, and some were not and you can get a pretty good idea of what it must of been like as for bows.Tony
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So what I'm reading is some guys were much better at building bows than others in their respective tribes. Wonder if the guys that could barely hack a serviceable bow out felt severe angst against the guys that could knock out real beauties? Probably not. Seems childish to me.
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I believe that most NA bows were tools and made to do a job and not necessarily to show off. Their thought patterns were way different than ours today. Some I've seen in in museums had grain violations and took a lot of set. Others were as well made as any I've ever seen.
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Pat, I can promise you if my life was dependant on my bow, be it self defense or groceries, it would be perfect all around. No way would I risk anything.
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"So what I'm reading is some guys were much better at building bows than others in their respective tribes. Wonder if the guys that could barely hack a serviceable bow out felt severe angst against the guys that could knock out real beauties? Probably not. Seems childish to me." i doubt it. the guys that werent as good probley had to do a little trading with the ones that were better at it.or maybe it made the not so good bowyers better warriors, kill the enemy with a club and get yourself a nice bow.lol must of been a reason behind counting coup.i dont see these folks as feeling angst because of material things. Tony
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Pat, I can promise you if my life was dependant on my bow, be it self defense or groceries, it would be perfect all around. No way would I risk anything.
x2
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Having never been to a museum with any archery stuff I'm wondering if replicas are always clearly marked as such or does that depend on the museum?
You might try looking through the Smithsonian Museum's "North American Ethnographic Collection" online. Just google it. They have a few hundred examples of bows from all over North America. many are in rough shape, and I always wish they had more than a couple pictures, but they are good examples.
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At MU in Colombia Missouri is Dr Grayson's collection. From what I could see the finish was nice. The roughest was an Inuit bow. That could be the state it was in when collected.
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I live in Oxford city in the UK and so am lucky to live near some extraordinarily great museums. My favourite is the Pitt Rivers museum of anthropology, which has a fantastic collection of bows (amongst other fearsome weapons!) I was in there the other day looking at the bows and was again struck by the beauty and quality of the native north american ones. Theyve got self, sinew (and snakeskin)d backed and horn horsebows. Also Californian paddle bows and a great collection of pellet bows. I tried to take photos but they didnt work cos of the reflection on the glass cases. At some point l want to see if someone from the museum will talk me through em and maybe get them out of the case's to be photographed! :-)
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The bow was a warriors most prized possessions so he wanted the best bow he can get. If he couldn't build it himself he would do some trading. That is why the sheep horn and elk antler bow were so highly prized bows. In some tribes when a warrior passed he was buried with his bow and his horse was killed and buried with him also.
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I have a very old bow from Vietnam with bamboo stribg and arrows, while there is some checking on the back the wood is smoothly finished