This article is part of
Wilderness Way
VOLUME 15, ISSUE 2.
You may view more
articles here or order
this issue or a
subscription here.
From Tree to Bow in Three Days… with Stone
Tools
by Steve Parker
“Hey Steve, are you up for a challenge?”
I had just pulled into the Carolina Traditional Archers’ annual Memorial Day Weekend shoot in Hickory, North Carolina. Spotting my good friend Barry McCall, I walked over to say hello when he hit me with this question. After several hectic weeks at work and home, I was ready to relax—my plans for the next three days included 3D shooting, flint-knapping, chucking atlatl darts, or just sitting around shooting the bull. Challenges were not on the list. I was curious as to what he had in mind, though.
“What kind of challenge?”
“Remember how we were talking a while back about building a stone tool bow?
“Yeah…”
”Well, let’s make one this weekend!”
We had both built several primitive bows with conventional steel woodworking tools, but neither of us had ever attempted to make one completely abo-style. We had talked about it and both of us were interested in trying it. This was as good a time as any, I guess. I didn’t really expect to get a bow shooting in three days starting with green wood, but it would be enjoyable and a good opportunity to see what could be accomplished with stone tools.
Deciding to make the process an experiment with stone-tool technologies from different cultures and time periods, we inventoried our combined toolkit. We both had brought some knappable rock: local rhyolite, quartzite, and a few pieces of good quality chert. Barry had brought a recently completed Woodland-period celt that he had pecked and ground from greenstone. He also had a replica of a Mid-Archaic Guilford chipped axe that he had knapped from tough quartzite, and the unfinished components of a stone adze. I could see that he had been planning this experiment for several weeks, and had been busy preparing for it. We decided to round out the toolkit with some earlier technology, so we quickly set up our knapping tarp and chipped out a couple of crude but serviceable handaxes from spalls of rhyolite. Packing our tools into a buckskin bag and bark bucket, we went looking for bow wood.
After
a half-hour’s search through the woods, we found what we
were looking for: a hickory sapling about three inches in
diameter with a long section of trunk that was straight
grained and mostly clear of knots. We wanted to try out our
new handaxes, so we decided to use them to cut the tree
down. After a little experimentation, we found that a
combination chopping/sawing action was the most efficient
use of our simple tools, and the sapling was felled in a
surprisingly short time. We tried out the celt for the task
of cutting the trunk to length, and it was working well
until I swung it a bit too hard and split the handle. We
finished the chopping with the quartzite chipped axe, which
performed admirably except for some loosening of the
hafting. It seems that with stone axes, the weakness is not
in the stone head, but in the handle and attachment. Making
replicas that look right is one thing, but until they are
actually put to use you can not really gauge how well you
did your job. I believe that through usage, we learned a few
things about hafting stone axes and celts which will be
applied to the next ones we make.
We
carried our prize back to camp, and planned our next steps.
The sapling was fairly small, but would have to be reduced
considerably to get it down to bow stave size. Normally with
a sapling bow, I would not risk splitting it—I would just
hog the excess wood off one side with a hatchet, drawknife,
or bandsaw. But lacking modern tools, we had to figure out
the most efficient, quickest way to do the deed. With a
wooden billet, we hammered a sharp wedge-shaped spall of
rhyolite into the end of the trunk to initiate the split,
and widened it with a deer antler tine driven into the split
until the opening was large enough to get our fingers into.
We then pulled the sapling in half, alternating pressure
between us to control the split and keep it from running out
to either side. We picked the best looking split and peeled
the bark off easily by hand after pounding one end of the
stave with a wooden billet to loosen the bark.
Figuring that the wood would be easier to work while it was fresh and still wet, we set to work on it immediately. The outline of an Eastern Woodlands-style flat bow was drawn on the back of the stave with a piece of charcoal from the fire. We did not want to use modern measuring tools to lay the bow out, so we fell back on the next best thing—our fingers. Two fingers wide at the handle and one fingertip wide at the tips looked about right. The next step was to take the stave down to the drawn outline. We tried a couple of different tools, and found that a large, heavy spall worked the best for this task. Using it like a hatchet and taking turns chopping, we soon had the stave roughed out. We used the same method to reduce the belly side of the stave to a handle-to-tip taper that allowed the stave to bend into a fairly even floor (or ground in this case) tiller. This whole process went surprisingly quickly, only taking an hour and a half or so to get the piece of wood worked down from a section of trunk to something that was beginning to resemble a bow.
We did not want to bend the bow any more until the moisture content had dropped, so we set the bow out in the hot sun and wind for the rest of the afternoon. The hickory wood was ideal for fast drying, not being prone to check like some other wood species would under these conditions. The drying time was put to good use making a hafted stone end scraper and using it to remove the hair from a dried piece of deer hide. The resulting rawhide was cut with a sharp flake in a spiral pattern to make the string for the bow. After wetting, it was tied to a limb, then a weight was added to the lower end and the string was twisted and the weight secured so that it would dry under tension. Barry knapped an adze blade from rhyolite and hafted it to a forked tree branch handle. By the time the sun set that evening, the green stave was already noticeably lighter and drier. We suspended it over the campfire to continue drying as we sat and talked, planning the next day’s work as whippoorwills called and the constellations turned in a great circle overhead as they have since the days when all bows were made with stone tools.
The next morning, after breakfast and shooting a 3D round, we went back to work on the bow. The afternoon’s drying had stiffened the bow up considerably, so quite a bit more wood had to come off. This is where the adze was worth its weight in gold (or good flint). After some experimenting, we soon found how to control the bite of the adze. As we were taking turns adzing the stave, our friend Pat Brennan came by and tried a turn with the adze. We were all pleasantly surprised at how well it took off wood. We also tried using simple spalls of rock, which worked almost as well as the adze, but were a little harder to control. We found that a large, heavy unmodified spall of rhyolite or quartzite used with a combination draw knifing/chopping action was the next best thing to the hafted adze for controlled wood removal. Soon, the bow was bending fairly evenly; but before stringing it we wanted to get the moisture content down some more. The bow went back out in the sun and wind to dry another afternoon.
By late morning the next day, the wood had dried considerably—it was time to string it up. We figured that pin nocks would be the easiest style to make with stone tools. A chert flake was quickly pressure flaked into a serrated unifacial saw, and it worked great for this task. The nocks were cut to depth on each side, and then the wood was split from the tip down to the cuts. A little smoothing with a flake and a gritty piece of sandstone, and the bow was ready for the string. After stringing, one limb was a bit stiffer than the other, and there were some stiff spots here and there. We improvised a tillering tree from… well… a tree. By hanging the bow from a cutoff branch, it was easy to pull the string by hand and see how it was bending. The adze soon took care of the major stiff spots, even though the wood was much harder to work after another day of drying. A truncated flake worked well as a scraper for fine tuning the tiller, taking off shavings much like the cabinet scrapers that I normally use at this stage of tillering.
By mid-day, we had the bow bending evenly at full draw, so the only thing left to do was to go shoot it. Barry took the first shot, and it was pretty thrilling to watch the Southeastern-style cane arrow fly far across the field. The cast was not bad at all for a quickly made primitive bow. We estimated the draw weight as probably not much over thirty pounds, and it had taken a couple inches of set from working the wood before it was completely seasoned. Still, even with the heavy rawhide string, it was a serious weapon with decent cast, and I have no doubt that it would put an arrow through a deer at close range.
I was really surprised at how much the wood dried after only a couple days of sun, wind, and campfire smoke. The experiment was definitely a success. I would not have thought before trying it that it would be possible to make a usable hunting bow so quickly with so simple a tool kit. We used hafted axes and adzes for much of the work, but experimented enough with simple spalls and handaxes to see that they would perform almost as well. In a survival situation, there would be few places where it would not be possible to find a usable sapling and some kind of rock that would spall with a sharp enough edge to use as a tool. In fact, we found that our tougher local rhyolite and quartzite (which are less desirable to most knappers) made better rough woodworking tools than the better grades of chert. Doing the heavy work while the wood was green was another key ingredient, as it took considerably more time and effort to remove wood after the stave had dried for a couple of days. Using a bigger sapling would allow a higher draw weight bow, but would also require more work in manufacturing it.
Our
bow would be perfectly adequate for survival hunting of
small game and deer-sized animals at close ranges. All in
all, our experiment was time well spent, and we learned to
look at “primitive” stone tools in a new light. It was our
first time attempting a woodworking project of this size
with stone tools, but I’m sure it will not be the last.
