Re: Monday, Answer
Arrows Answer.
John was headed in the correct area concerning the placement of the flight feathers, see below. Dale was thinking ballistics too, but it wasn't the shaft but the bindings that I was looking for. No gold forehead stars this week, but John and Dale get a silver star for meritorious thought.
Firstly, do not underestimate the accuracy of the indians equipment developed over eons and practise using it every day.
The stay at home non-warrior dedicated arrow makers, bow makers, fletchers of Apache, Pima, and Comanche Arrows were made with the feathers of turkey, hawk, and eagle and placed in such a way that there was no spin to the arrow. For that reason a hunting arrow had the arrow head placed in line with the arrow nock (vertical to vertical). If it was a war arrow it was placed at right angles to the nock. The reason for this was that animal ribs pointed to the ground in a vertical plane. The human�s ribs were horizontal with the ground. In each case the highest percentage way to reach soft tissue was the goal. I know that this sounds odd, but E. Lisle Reedstrom in �Apache Wars� stands by the statement.
Reason two. War arrows were poisoned with the venom of Gila Monsters, Spiders, Scorpions, Snakes that were stored in decaying animal livers. The object in war was to kill without regard to food. A hunting arrow was designed without poison so as to not hurt the person eating the killed object. Some were blunt with no head and killed by minimal penetration using blunt force trauma. Poisoning the arrowhead shot into a victim was not a good idea if you were going to feed the kill to your family. Some of this (not the poisoning, but the effect of the poison) is disputed by the 1890 article mentioned below. This, incidentally, is why Indians found it better to funnel Buffalo into weirs to force running buffalo off of cliffs so that there were high numbers of animal kills with little loss of weaponry.
Reason three
Indians used sinew, body fluids, and pitch to hold the arrowhead on. When this entered a victim (typically about 3�) it had to be removed in 10 to 20 minutes or body heat and moisture would start to loosen the bindings. Even if the arrow shaft was withdrawn, the head would have to be cut out or pushed through. For hunting, the arrow was made to hold the arrowhead on much longer, and with the arrow protruding every time it hit something it would go in deeper and do more damage. In a chase the arrow was easier to see and prevented some animals from charging through brush, rock spaces, or going into holes. For hunting, the arrow was designed to come out in one piece with damage to some surrounding tissue but that would be cut around without too much harm to the remaining meat. With a war arrow, if the head separated from the shaft the initial damage was compounded by having the head stay in. Sepsis was often the result. At the least it would slow the victim down and perhaps poison him later. The target for a war shot was the abdomen, not the heart, there was little hope of living with a belly shot. As was pointed out Mexicans often covered their abdomen with wadded cloth and a loose tunic having experience in the area of Indian marksmanship and the results.
For their time, the Indians of the American and Mexico Southwest were as skilled in technical warfare as the scientists of Alamogordo.
Some arrow wounds in bone (and lots of other medical displays�like the leg lost by General Sickles at Gettysburg) can be found in the National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Hospital complex Bethesda, MD.(free)
You can also check out : Vesper Hours of the Stone, John G. Bourke
American Anthropologist, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jan., 1890), pp. 55-64 (on web under Apache Arrow or Google, Google Books, American Anthropologist 1890 vol iii)
This article consists of 10 page(s) and supports portions of the information above but has difference with regard to poison and no proof for the reason for differences in the placement of the nock and arrowhead but supports the orientation of the head to the nock.
If you have the interest. Give a look.
