09-30-2006, 07:50 PM
Wow Salvianus, laude to you! Good sourcing. Shame of it all is that the archaeological survival rate of a selfbow would be very pour, as was mentioned earlier. Of course your comment invited an experiment, so I have strung a 175 centimeter selfbow, went out and shot a few arrows kneeling. At short ranges, of 30 meters or so, this was a very bad idea, indeed, as I just clipped the ground with my second shot (the first being a bit high on target, which for safety reasons only has a height of a meter, when standing, my arrows travel down, versus up). However, when wanting a greater carry (or to pierce someones chest cavity), it worked OK, because the bow is lifted to a somewhat higher hold to increase the trajectory.
I dug around the RAT fora on archers, the general impression being that composite horn and sinew bows are a nightmare in maintenance in the boggy conditions of my part of the empire. We'll probably never know, but I guess it's a good bet both types were used not only for practice, but for showering arrows as well. Mounted archers, as displayed by Trajan:
www.trajan20.freeserve.co.uk/page6.html , would have always favored the composite recurve, I believe, a longer bow being very unpractical on a horse.
I dug around the RAT fora on archers, the general impression being that composite horn and sinew bows are a nightmare in maintenance in the boggy conditions of my part of the empire. We'll probably never know, but I guess it's a good bet both types were used not only for practice, but for showering arrows as well. Mounted archers, as displayed by Trajan:
www.trajan20.freeserve.co.uk/page6.html , would have always favored the composite recurve, I believe, a longer bow being very unpractical on a horse.
