I see your dilemma, but maybe you can work it in your favor? Since no one is doing it, you will be the first. Get the borg bow guys something new to try out. Target families and kids, and get ‘em hooked early. Do little events at summer camps maybe, or with the Boy Scouts, have an informal primitive meet and invite local town officials like the mayor and business owners, and get some free press. Food always brings folks. Have “mastodon burgers” and “mega-fauna dogs” and Cave Man Juice (soda or some other beverage) Bet your local paper would do a feature on primitive skills and weapons – just call the paper and talk to the reporters or editors. Having it at your local archery or gun club can help you tie it in to another event. I did a toss and piggybacked it to a fall turkey shoot, so we got some shotgun folks coming over to play. Hunters, I have found, really like learning about what we used to survive thousands of years before guns were invented.
Lots of organizations would really love this stuff, like veteran organizations, a soldier’s home, local summer camps, etc. If you have a natural history or American Indian museum, talk to them about having an event at that site. Making it free is really appreciated by parents. I’m looking at doing an atlatl event at Old Deerfield, which is only a few miles from my house. There is a summer camp in this region for under privileged kids that does awesome work, and I am going to contact them about volunteering to do some stuff with them. Shoot, there are tons of ways you can make these kinds of things work, not just a big, established event like Twin Oaks and Mojam and NEPSG. Those take years to get to where they are now – something to work toward. And get knappers and tanners and other primitive skills folks to come out. The more the better. Heck, if you have room, have it at your house, bbq some amazing food, do some bow making, and have a small group come and have some fun. Good for the soul, good for building a reputation, too.
Don’t forget Paeleo Planet. Most of the folks who came to my ataltl events were through posting there. A local college anthro club was another source of participants, and word of mouth. Newspaper articles, too, for the Roman event, and we got about 100 people to come out during that nasty rain from the hurricane that hit the region last fall.
And if you feel really ambitious, think about founding a primitive archer / skills program. That is part of what I am doing at my club, building up long moribund archery program, but keeping the emphasis on primitive. I’ve got the green light to do a lot because they now see that ancient stuff does bring in people and give added diversity to the usual shotgun and pistol and rifle programs. All this is part of my newly founded Stone Age Living Project. We are going to do a lot over time, even building Mesolithic and Native American structures, dugout canoes and coracles, short and long treks, winter atlatl and archery shoots, snowshoe making, all kinds of cool stuff.
Dane
