Went to a museum in Santa Fe, NM yesterday. The security guh told me no pictures so I had to take these very discretel on my cell,, sorry for the quality. I had my good Nikon DSLR with me but would have been too obvious.
Aparently this wasn't the location we really wanted to hit up. They have locations throughout the area and the exhibit I really wanted to see was something like Points in Time and was supposed to be a plethora of projectile points. I had my kid with and no wife to herd her so I really didn't get a whole lot of quality time. This location had mostly textiles and pottery, well worth the trip and $8 entry fee. I'll go back next week when she's in school and try to find the other location. Fortunately there were some worthy specimens amongst the pottery.
I was amazed at how short the bows are and how narrow the broadheads. Some of these arrows actually dated to the 1880's but I lost track of which ones. Looked like the width of the broadheads was just a shade over a half inch wide and I'd guess between 14 and 16 gauge steel.
The bows werw sinew backed, looked to me like a single layer, and definately showed their age. Shorter and wider than I would have thought. Can't even begin to try and figure out what woods were used.
The last image is aweful, but I posted it because you can sort of see how short the fletchings are. They weren't worn down over time I'm guessing, based on the sinew binding on both ends of the fletches. Fletches were surprisingly only about 2 to 2.5 inches long. These were dated to the 1880's as well if I remember correctly.
The gem of the whole experience was finally learning a couple of species of local plants to try to locate. Wax current (Ribes inebrians) bow and arrow wood, and Apache Plume (Fallugia patadixal) arrow shafts.
