Primitive Archer
Main Discussion Area => Bows => Topic started by: Billinthedesert on April 03, 2018, 03:49:04 pm
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Was skimming Steve Allely's chapter, "Western Indian Bows," in Volume One of TBB and he mentioned Phil Wilke's paper on the subject.
Here is a link to it.
http://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt4v5249w9/qt4v5249w9.pdf
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Well that is pretty neat! I learned a lot from that, thank you!
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I cant click on the link?
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Put "http" in front of the 1st colon.
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"By the time ethnographers seriously concerned
themselves with recording the details
of traditional archery, the bowyer's art had
vanished from the Great Basin. "
Bummer, right?
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I edited the link to add http per Knoll's suggestion. Hope that helps.
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That is so very interesting how they managed to do that in a primitive setting.Then with the gauanteed regrowth of straight grained knot free wood.
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Utah has a few trees like that in the Roosevelt area where my buddy lives. While we go out looking for juniper stave and see a tree with straight grain, sometimes on the backside you can see where a stave was taken. Or a very large lower limb that the top is missing a section, and tried to heal itself but junipers are very slow growing and that’s what’s cool is that evidence is still visible.
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I read this paper a few years back and it was fascinating.
Bryce, I found one tree, too, down by Nephi, and I THINK one way out west, near the Blue Mountains.
When I harvested a few staves the same way, I just sawed partially through each end of the stave, on the top side of a long, sprawling lower limb of a big juniper. If you leave it a while (weeks) and come back, you can just lean on the tip of the limb out past the second cut, and the stave 90% pops off as the limb bends. It's easy to pull or lever it free.
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Very interesting reading! It would be neat to actually see such a tree! Getting such a stave would great!
Hawkdancer
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Thanks for posting, very interesting. (A few of us out there don't have copies of the TBB).
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I read this paper a few years back and it was fascinating.
Bryce, I found one tree, too, down by Nephi, and I THINK one way out west, near the Blue Mountains.
When I harvested a few staves the same way, I just sawed partially through each end of the stave, on the top side of a long, sprawling lower limb of a big juniper. If you leave it a while (weeks) and come back, you can just lean on the tip of the limb out past the second cut, and the stave 90% pops off as the limb bends. It's easy to pull or lever it free.
Exactly! You can actually cut the two end on the upper part a a limb and I’ve heard of some leaving it there to partially season to keep it from having too much reflex.
Which blue mountains? Bc he have blue mountains here in Oregon which there are juniper and yew
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We have a range called the Blue Mountains on the Utah/Nevada border, near the Deep Creek Range.
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I have seen a few of these trees,where i grew up..Some,i was shown,,others i accidentally found..
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Thank you for sharing that paper. I have not seen a tree like that but will be on the look out to try and spot one.
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Has anyone here tried it on yew or other species?
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I have tried it on elm!
I had this idea that I might season a stave on the tree better in the hot summer. I found a stave I wanted and instead of cutting the whole sapling down, taking it home and splitting it, I cut halfway through the tree at the top and bottom of the stave. I also peeled away some of the bark on the sides, but didn't score it or take bark off the back of the stave.
I left it a week or so, came back, braced my foot against the little tree, and pulled the top over, away from the stave. Sure enough, it just started popping off, the rest of the tree bent my way and kind of folded over. It wasn't a nice, clean split. It was ragged with lots of tear-out, and I had to twist and wrestle it off, but it kind of worked, and the stave was definitely dryer than fresh cut, though not "ready".
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I'm going to try it
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I have tried it on elm!
I had this idea that I might season a stave on the tree better in the hot summer. I found a stave I wanted and instead of cutting the whole sapling down, taking it home and splitting it, I cut halfway through the tree at the top and bottom of the stave. I also peeled away some of the bark on the sides, but didn't score it or take bark off the back of the stave.
I left it a week or so, came back, braced my foot against the little tree, and pulled the top over, away from the stave. Sure enough, it just started popping off, the rest of the tree bent my way and kind of folded over. It wasn't a nice, clean split. It was ragged with lots of tear-out, and I had to twist and wrestle it off, but it kind of worked, and the stave was definitely dryer than fresh cut, though not "ready".
I know this is quibbling but if you had cut it and taken it home wouldn't it be drier in the week or so? Not to mention the gas used for two trips. I'm trying to figure out a "why". Did the natives notch and leave it or did they remove it immediately? Or do we know?
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I tried it just cuz.
The vacant lot I cut it from is right in the neighborhood and barely out of my way between here and work. It was a pure experiment. I was thinking about how tough it seemed to me to make bows with stone tools, and wondering how to minimize that work by doing things like notching and splitting, chiseling, etc., to rough the bow out.
What I was mostly interested in was seeing if the stave got dry enough sitting there, that the wood was stiffer than the green, live wood it was attached to, so it would pop off when stressed. But, I don't remember there being any advantage to it. The stave WAS stiffer, but it still had drying to do, still tried to warp, etc...
That same year I did the experiment where I cut the tree DOWN, but left the whole top with leaves on. I wanted to see if the foliage, plus the capillary action of the trunk would pull a lot of moisture from the wood and prevent drying issues. It sort of did. In just three or four days, that stave, with bark on, had lost a ton more weight than others cut top and bottom would have. The bark was still easy to peel, and I peeled it, and left it whole. It did warp, but didn't check, which it usually would have. It wasn't any better than roughing out a stave to dry, though.
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Great article. Thanks for posting the link. I’ve always wondered about how they worked with Osage. It’s such a hard wood. When I look at the Encyclopedia of Native American Bows I noticed that a fair number had evidence of pith in them indicating it was taken from a smaller diameter branch rather than the trunk. Fascinating read about the Great Basin peoples.