fitzcoraldo
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Re: Circles under churches
May 12, 2005, 20:07
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Otzi the iceman was found with a unfinished yew longbow that was taller than he was.
The oldest european bows were found in Denmark, they were long bows made of elm.
If you check out the cave art of Los Caballos in Spain you'll see mesolithic hunters using longbows.
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PeterH
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Re: Circles under churches
May 12, 2005, 20:38
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Yay!!!
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FourWinds
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Re: Circles under churches
May 13, 2005, 17:30
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If you define a longbow as being simply a long bow then they would be longbows, yes.
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FourWinds
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Re: Circles under churches
May 13, 2005, 17:36
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And if you're wondering why I say that it's because Otzi's bow was apparently all heartwood, whereas the medieval ones took advantage of the tensile differences between sapwood and heartwood. Otzi's bow would not have had the power that a medieval longbow had.
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fitzcoraldo
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Re: Circles under churches
May 13, 2005, 20:39
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I read that it was a 60 pound bow, suitable for bringing down ibex, thats a pretty powerful bow isn't it?
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PeterH
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Re: Circles under churches
May 13, 2005, 21:50
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Did you see the television programe a while back, when just such a replica was tested. Boffins took measurements and made all sorts of cautious predictions about how far it would shoot an arrow and what the penetration would be at x, y and z metres. Put the bow on a machine with a known controllable, measurable pull. Shot the arrows and the results were pretty pathetic. Gave the bow to an archer who took it into the field. He shot an arrow much further than the experts said was possible. Then he trimmed the enormous and ridiculous white flights to about half. With drag reduced, the arrow went twice as far as the boffins said it ever could and made a neat job of penetrating a pig carcass at extreme range. Guess those Neolithic guys never had to worry about nay-saying boffins or extravagant fluffy feathers.
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PeterH
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Re: Circles under churches
May 13, 2005, 21:56
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I know what you mean - the term has come to mean a specific type of bow from a specific historical period
But..
if Oetzi's bow is a long one made from yew in the Neolithic, then it's a Neolithic yew longbow in my book ; D
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FourWinds
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Re: Circles under churches
May 14, 2005, 07:45
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60 lb pull on a bow is at the top end of what a fully grown, very fit man could pull today, so yes it is rather powerful. However, some people reckon that the longbow 'proper' could have been up to 120 lb pull, which is why the medieval archers started training as kids.
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FourWinds
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Re: Circles under churches
May 14, 2005, 07:50
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His bow seems to be described as 'unfinished' everywhere, so I wonder how they made a replica and fired it. How unfinished was it? And how much extra finishing did they do? The super-sized fletching could have given better accuracy, which, in a hunting bow, would have been more useful than distance, especially to a skilled tracker and hunter. The need for distance vs accuracy is a battle thing. If you have hundreds of archers firing at hundreds of targets in a group you don't need accuracy, but distance is very desirable.
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Wiggy
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Re: Circles under churches
May 16, 2005, 09:22
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I was told as a kid that every English man of the period around the 100 years war was compelled to practice archery every sunday afternoon. Is this correct?
I also read somewhere that the exhumed skeletons of archers from this period have almost freakish, superhuman bone density in the shoulders and arms.
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