What wood did the Native Americans use to make their bows, arrows, spears and other weapons?
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Mastodon
ANSWERS: 6
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lots of wood from red wood trees
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There was not a specific wood that was used as different tribes use different woods, they used whatever natural resources where available to them by the geographical area they reside.
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Mountain cedar or juniper for the bow,the arrows were made of Pluchea sericea
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... whatever HARD wood was available ... In the west, the Blackfoot (Alberta-Montana) would use a single piece of mountain cedar for light duty bows (deer), but for heavy duty (buffalo, grizzly) they would make a multi-ply composite bow out of mountain cedar & juniper, notched for a tight fit & lashed together with moose sinew ... their short arrows were wild rosewood, while their long arrows were often also cedar. In the east, the Mohawk (Quebec-New York) preferred short bows & arrows made of maple or oak.
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That depended on where they lived and what was available to them. We used cedar in the Sierras mostly. A buddy whose tribe is from southern CA northern MX said they used specially treated elderberry wood for their bows. Our arrows were a two pc design that used wild rose shoot for the main shaft and buck brush limbs for the fore shaft that held the razor sharp stone point. The main shaft would fall of when the animal ran after being hit, but the foreshaft remained in the body, cutting and causing more internal bleeding as the animal or enemy fled. 1/22
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There were at least hundreds - probably thousands - of different Native American tribes, each with their own culture and living in a wide range of habitats. Simply put: they did not all use the same wood for bows. Probably more than a dozen different types of wood were used in the construction of bows (by the hundreds or thousands of various tribes), and likewise a DIFFERENT collection of wood types for spears, and likewise a DIFFERENT collection of wood types for other wooden tools. (I.e. each tribe would have used the type of wood for a spear that they believed to be most efficacious, whether because of physical properties or "spiritual" properties or both, and each tribe would have used a DIFFERENT type of wood for a bow, a type that they believed to be most efficacious for THAT particular use, and etc.)
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