____________________________________________________________________________ I dont mean to split hairs, but your archery links are quite Euro-centric, and other cultures have been practicing forms earlier than listed in the chronology. For example the Chinese had developed crossbows in large numbers by 700 BC/BCE (and repeating ones later, commonly thought by 400BC/BCE) and as such predate the slow development by the uncivilised west. Here's a cut and paste of various info on Asian archery FYI, though i could drag up some more crossbow specific ones: ============================= Asian Traditional Archery Network http://www.atarn.org http://www.atarn.org/japanese/jap_stand.JPG This site is maintained be Stephen Selby, who authored the book Chinese Archery ( http://www.NYCMongol.com/Amazon.html#Selby ), and is the best single source for articles on Asian archery. It has articles on most anything relating to archery in Asia. The book poses the theory that Kyudo evolved out of Tang(?) dynasty Chinese Archery technique and the medatative aspect of it evolved from Qigong which he says is an integral part of archery in China. You can see Selby demonstrating a Chinese archery technique on my website: http://SilverHorde.ViaHistoria.com/ChineseArchery.html I have some other pages on Archery on my website as well: http://SilverHorde.ViaHistoria.com/MongolArchery.html (I did not fire the antique arrow in the picture, just posed to have a good photo for the website) http://SilverHorde.ViaHistoria.com/Kyudo.html (You may recognize Jaap in the demonstrations as he merchants at Pennsic under the name Yumi. The top picture is his teacher, the Imperial Bowmaker to the Japanese Emperor - forgot his name though) http://SilverHorde.ViaHistoria.com/InspectingBows.html http://SilverHorde.ViaHistoria.com/ThumbRing.html Here's a couple others that may be of interest. I'm sorry I don't have more but I haven't worked on my archery web pages in a while. http://www.primitivearcher.com/pages/articles/ironhead.html This magazine has some interesting articles in its back issue list but this is the only relevant one online. http://www.fischnetz.com/kassai/ A nice, but huge, MPEG on Mounted Archery in Hungary. I hope you find some of this useful. ================= Cheers, Ozbeg
