why bow types???

[Shooter_G22]

Ok Ladies and Gents..

     i have a question that is probably a silly one but i dont know the answer soo i thought id ask it...

  Why are the bows or primitive bows that are made to duplicate ancient bows catergorized as such...

 i mean like the native american bows...  would all the bows of a certain tribe be made the same way???  would there not be diferant types and styles wieghts and lenghts or would they all be made to certain specs and that is what it is....    i mean i have a small hunting circul or group that i hunt with... and amongst ourselfs we all want and or like differant styles and want all differant types of bows...   i could only imagine a whole tribe... i mean with just a handful of hunters that are allmost all family not one of us wants or would like to have the same type bow...


why is it that a tribe of great numbers would be limitied to one style and lenght or weight of bow...     i mean especially if all the materials were gathered naturaly and worked on with all primitve hand tools...   wouldn't the construction of and type of bow be determined by the wood and material and or craftsman...   i mean if indeed the bows were all made by one bower i could see all of them coming out the same...  but even today with all the power tools and supplies readilly available bowers of today dont all make only one type of bow...  at least this is what i gather...  i hav seen on here that most of the bowers here build the bow around the wood and let the wood or stave decide what type of bow its going to become...   why would it be diferant back then?

i dont understand or think that all the bows of a certain tribe were all made the same way???
can some one explain why i am supposed to believe this theiry???

not trying an idiot but i am a little ignorant on this subj...  soo i was curoise and wanted to ask???

[JackCrafty]

Native American bows were not always alike within the same tribe.  They were all similar, yes, but not exactly alike.

Bows were often traded. If you were and Indian making bows for a living, you wouldn't want to make a "weird" looking bow...you would want to make a bow that everyone knew was tried and tested...and worked well for the style of hunting (or warfare) that the tribe engaged in.

Also, not every man made his own bow. Many tribes had certain individuals that made bows.  That individual usually made bows of the same type because it's more efficient to do so.  Sometimes tradition or "medicine" dictated bow design as well.

[Hillbilly]

Like Patrick said, there was a lot of individual variation within tribes, but most of the bows probably fit within a general style in most tribes (with variation in length, weight, materials, decoration, etc.). Many Plains tribes made both self-bows and sinew-backed bows, but they looked pretty much alike. Some tribes like the Seneca or Penobscot made bows of several different designs, while other tribes pretty much stuck within one design. I could never figure out why some cultures only made one type of stone projectile point for thousands of years, but that's the way it was-there are point types that were used by every individual in a culture across large areas for long periods of time with almost no variation. Maybe tradition and taboo against "outside" ideas? Anyway, most tribal societies are set up differently than ours-in most tribal cultures, the individual takes a back seat in importance to the importance of the people as a whole, with less room for individual expression.

[JackCrafty]

Hillbilly brings up an excellent point (no pun intended).

Projectile point types didn't vary much over time or among individuals...and the same observation can be applied to bow types.  Why?  I guess it's like the "modern" practice of uniforms among armies: same clothing, same weapons, same haircuts, same everything.  I think Native American societies were a lot more organised than we think.....and the consistency of the weapons and tools reflects this.

[a finnish native]

Well here are my two cents into this subject

It has been proven that Different tribes had somewhat different bows, mainly due to environment issues such as the climate, the terrain, the game etc. How ever, the bows were not made as mass production, but so that they were made to fit a person. In most tribes, clans, villages etc. there was a bowyer (did I spell that right?) or a few who made the bows for the men. In different cultures the bows were different, and they even varied amongst one tribe or village.
The Chiricahua-Apache had a way of measuring the drawlenght of a man so that the man would stretch his arm forward and when it would be straight they would measure the distance from the tip of his thumb to his armpit. This way almost each bow would have a different draw lenght and thus be of different lenght also.
There have been some dominating bow designs in different parts of the globe. For instace most of the bows from the plains of north America were of the gull wing profile. However the Plains tribes used also D bows, recurve bows and gull wing profiled bows with recurves. Some mentions about C profile bows have also been made.
The poundage varied also greatly. Stronger men had stronger bows. Kids bows were light, bows of young warriors were stronger and the bows of fully grown warriors were mainly the strongest. I recall that a Cheyenne man called Strong Left Hand had been mentioned to have a bow significantly stronger than the other men, and that only a few men were able to draw his bow.
So of course the designs vary between persons, but in most cases the bows were of somewhat similar design in certain geographical areas.
I think this was so because the bow was to a primitive man a weapon to feed his family, a weapon to protect and assault. I believe that as nowadays the the people that were truly and deeply interested in bow making and such were a minority amongst primitive people also. So mainly they just wanted a deasent bow to hunt with and that would fit their anatomy.
But then again there are always some unanswered questions such as that why did the Blackfeet Indians have shorter bows in average than the Comanche? Comanches being by average about 165 cm long amongst men, when the same average lenght amongst Blackfeet men was about 182 cm.
These are questions that we can only answered by theories. So Keep introducing different theories 

[a finnish native]

damn you people are fas. or then I'm just slow. when I started typing my reply I was the first to even look into this thread. Good points you got there

[M-P]

I think one point to consider is the shear weight of "custom" or "tradition" in a tightly knit group.  That is especially true of things that a culture may consider as a defining feature of their culture.  (ie. " We do it this way, because it proves we're not those un-people across the river.)  New ideas do get introduced and accepted, so for instance the bow pretty much supplanted the atlatl across north america in what was probably a fairly short time, but other things may persist unchanged for considerable lengths of time.  In addition, if all information is passed on orally and all training is on an apprentice basis, then there may be little theoretical knowledge on which to base experimentation.   Ron