You ask a very good question. Yes, there are other books out there but you already have the best ones, IMO.
You've got to be careful what you buy...many books out there are simply made for a quick buck and do not give you an understanding of the art involved in creating Native American archery equipment.
If you just want to see what the actual bows and arrows look like, check out past auctions of artifacts, museums, online exhibits, and old photographs.
If you want to master the art of making these weapons, you should realise a few things:
- Many bows and arrows that have survived are ceremonial or low grade items. By "low grade" I mean stuff that was made by Indians for the tourist trade...which continues to the present day. You cannot use these as a guide when making hunting or war equipment.
- After contact with Europeans, the quality of Native American bows declined. Warriors almost immediately abandoned the bow as a fighting weapon in favor of the firearm. This happend very quickly east of the Mississippi. A lot of stuff you see in museums was picked up after the bow's heyday as the most important weapon of defensive warfare. Many are hunting bows/arrows designed for specific types of game. With the exception of the buffalo hunters, we know very little about other types of NA hunters.
- Not all tribes placed a great deal of importance on the function of bows and arrows. Consequently, you may see designs that look "silly" or make no sense at all.
- Not all the stuff you see on display is labeled correctly.
- The bow itself does not show you how it was used. The arrows do not show you how they were shot. For example, we may assume all the arrows were drawn to the arrowhead, or that the bows were held at a certain angle to the vertical (i.e. straight up and down, at a 45oangle, etc.). We really don't know for sure. There are far too few eyewitness accounts.
- Many tribes completely lost all knowledge of how to make bows and arrows the "old" way. Many have tried to regain the knowledge through research but they run into the same roadblocks that you and I run into: inaccurate eyewitness accounts, inaccessible information locked away in university libraries and warehouses, lack of funds, and general missunderstandings and myths surrounding "primitive archery". These days, just because a real Indian makes a bow a certain way, doesn't mean it was made that way in the past.
