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How to Escape From the Iron Age?

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Image: Steel rebar construction for the concrete foundation of a wind turbine in Gilliam County, US. Image by Goose Chap, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Trapped in the Iron Age

In 1836, Danish antiquarian and curator Christian Jürgensen Thomsen distinguished three prehistorical eras based on the dominant materials used for weapons and cutting implements: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.¹ Thomsen’s classification refers to the past, but according to his criteria, we have never evolved beyond the Iron Age. Even in the 21st century, iron remains the dominant material, not just for weapons and cutting implements but for about every modern technology.

We now use most iron in the form of steel. However, according to Thomsen’s criteria, we cannot speak of a “Steel Age.” First, steel is merely an alloy of iron (>98%) and carbon (<2%). Second, humans have been producing steel since the beginning of the Iron Age. That is a little-known fact in the Western world, where steel production only took off in the nineteenth century with fossil fuels. However, Asian and African metallurgists developed high-quality steels much earlier, and this knowledge eventually allowed Europeans to do the same – on a much larger scale.²

By 2021, the global iron and steel output reached 1,950 million tonnes (Mt). That is 22 times larger than the combined aluminum and copper output (88 Mt). The global iron and steel output corresponds to five times the global plastics output (391 Mt) and dwarfs the worldwide production of silicon (8.5 Mt) and lithium (0.1 Mt).³⁴ Steel is the fundamental material of industrial societies. Without plastics, lithium, or silicon, we would still be in an industrial society. Without iron and steel, we would be thrown back 3,000 years into the Bronze Age.

Where is all that steel?

The massive presence of steel in industrial society is not so obvious.⁵ At home, we find several steel appliances such as the refrigerator, washing machine, water boiler, bathtub, and cooking, heating, and cooling appliances. However, only 2-3% of total steel production ends up in domestic appliances.⁶⁷⁸ Outdoors, there’s a lot of steel in the form of vehicles. These are especially passenger cars that use around 10% of all steel globally (20% in rich countries). Busses, trucks, trains, and ships add another 4-5%. Altogether that is still less than 20% of the global steel output.

Most steel is embedded in other materials, located underground, or far away from residential areas.

Most steel is embedded in other materials, located underground, or far away from residential areas. More than half of global steel production goes into construction, which includes buildings (residential, commercial, industrial) and infrastructures (bridges, tunnels, harbors, canals, runways, oil rigs, refineries, pipelines, power plants, transmission lines, railways, subways, and so on). Much of that steel is embedded in concrete. Reinforced concrete is the world’s primary building material, and concrete is the only material that can match the output of steel (1,819 Mt in 2021).

Roughly 15% of global steel production serves to make machinery, including machine tools, industrial equipment, electrical hardware, and construction, mining, and farming machines. Even products made of other materials – such as other metals, plastics, and wood – are shaped by steel tools.⁵ The final 15% of steel production ends up in a variety of objects, from screws over food packaging to furniture and shipping containers.⁶⁷⁸

Image: Reinforced concrete is the world’s primary building material. Hole on Interstate 84, US. Image by Tony George, Oregon Department of Transportation, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

The environmental footprint of the steel industry

Steel is often presented as one of the most sustainable materials. Unlike plastics, steel can be recycled without any loss in quality. The steel industry has made great advances in energy efficiency, more so than many other industries. Making one ton of crude steel now requires roughly 20 gigajoules (GJ) of primary energy on average – three times less than in 1950.⁹ This compares very favorably to other materials such as aluminum (175 GJ/t), plastics (80-120 GJ/t), or copper (45 GJ/t).⁷ Unlike plastics, steel is a biodegradable material.¹⁰ Finally, iron ore is not in short supply. It makes up 5 percent of the Earth’s crust and is fourth in abundance among the elements.¹¹ For comparison, copper only makes up 0.01%.⁵

However, despite all these advantages, the global iron and steel industry consumes more energy and produces more carbon emissions than any other industry. The total primary energy use of crude steel production was 39 exajoules (EJ) in 2021, which corresponds to 7% of all energy used worldwide in that year (595 EJ). The greenhouse gas emissions are even higher because around 75% of energy use comes from coal – the fuel with the highest carbon emissions. In 2021, the iron and steel industry produced 3.3 Gt of carbon emissions, roughly 9% of global emissions (36.3 Gt).¹² The concrete industry follows closely with 8%.

The iron and steel industry consumes more energy and produces more carbon emissions than any other industry.

The estimates above come from the World Steel Association and the International Energy Agency. These data are available for all metals and have been documented over a long period, allowing for historical comparisons. However, they only refer to the smelting of the metal. They do not include the energy use and carbon emissions for mining and transporting iron ore, coal, limestone, scrap, and steel products. Nor do they include the energy and emissions for coke production and ore preparation – all essential to the steel production process.⁷

Scientific studies that have set wider boundaries for the iron and steel industry conclude that the energy cost of steel production increases by 50% to 100%.¹³ One report concludes that the methane emissions from metallurgical coal mining alone could increase emissions by 27%. Another study estimates that seaborne transport of iron ore and steel adds 10-15% extra emissions.¹⁴¹⁵ Iron and steel production also create other environmental problems, such as high water use, solid waste production, and significant air and water pollution.

The carbon footprint of the iron and steel industry is incompatible with current ambitions to eliminate net carbon emissions by 2050, even less so because steel production is very likely to expand further. Steel production grew tenfold since 1950 and doubled between 2000 and 2020, growing faster than many researchers had predicted.¹⁶ Furthermore, efficiency gains have decreased, and there is a scientific consensus that current technologies have reached their thermodynamic limits.⁷⁹¹⁷ During the last two decades, the average energy use for the production of 1 ton of steel has remained around 20 GJ/t.⁹¹⁸

How to make steel without fossil fuels?

There are two ways to make steel, and one is much more sustainable than the other.¹⁹ On the one hand, there is the blast furnace or basic oxygen furnace, in which steel is made from iron ore and coal. This technology is – in its essential form – 2000 years old. On the other hand, there is the electric arc furnace, in which steel is made from steel scrap and electricity. The electric arc furnace, which is a relatively new technology, consumes much less energy than the blast furnace, makes use of a recycled resource (no need to mine iron ore), and works without the direct use of coal or other fossil fuels (the electricity can be supplied by solar, wind, or atomic power).

The most energy-efficient electric arc furnaces now consume less than 300 kilowatt-hours of electricity per ton of steel produced.⁹²⁰ Hypothetically, if we had produced all steel in 2021 (1,950 Mt) in such furnaces, the total power consumption of the global iron and steel industry would have been only 585 terawatt-hours (Twh). That corresponds to just one-third of all electricity generated by wind turbines worldwide in the same year (1,848 Twh). Unfortunately, more than 70% of global steel output was made in blast furnaces fed by coal and iron ore.⁹²⁰ A blast furnace consumes twenty times more energy and cannot be operated by electricity because coal is both the fuel source and the chemical reductant. The combustion of coal produces carbon monoxide that reduces the iron from its ore.⁷

Not enough scrap available

The solution seems obvious: let’s produce all that steel in electric arc furnaces. However, this is impossible. There’s not enough scrap available: the continuous growth of the global steel output makes a circular flow of resources impossible.²¹ It takes decades before most steel becomes available for recycling. For example, there is 543 Mt of steel stocked in ships.²² The scrap available for recycling in 2021 corresponds to the production level of 1965 when global steel production was less than one-quarter of what it is today (450 Mt).⁹¹⁰¹⁵²³ Consequently, the other three quarters need to be produced in blast furnaces using coal and freshly mined iron ore.

Image: Cars for scrapping at the Port of Cardiff. Gareth James via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Nowadays, China produces roughly half of the steel in the world and does that almost exclusively (+90%) in blast furnaces using coal and iron ore. Many other steelmaking nations have a higher share of electric arc furnaces. However, it makes little sense to point the finger at China. First, the US and Europe have outsourced many of their industries to China since the 2000s, a trend that corresponds neatly with the growing steel output in that country. Furthermore, twenty to forty years ago, China hardly used any steel. Consequently, there is almost no scrap available. China has no other choice than to use blast furnaces.²⁴

Ever higher grades of steel

A second obstacle is the continuous development of higher grades of steel. There are now over 2,500 different types of steel with a variety of properties, such as increased strength, tolerance to high temperatures, or corrosion resistance.⁷⁹²³²⁵ Although these higher quality steels can be produced in electric arc furnaces, they are not made from scrap, and they have much higher energy use.

Steel available for recycling forms a mix of steel grades. That mix is suitable for making plain carbon steel but not highly alloyed steels, which require scrap with similar qualities. However, that scrap is not available. For example, stainless steel, the most produced special steel grade, has a recycling rate of only 15%. Almost 60 Mt of stainless steel was produced in 2021, compared to only 4 Mt in 1980.²⁶ The traditional use of stainless steel was in cutlery, surgical tools, and medical and food processing equipment. However, it is now also used in the construction of tunnels and outdoor furniture, wastewater treatment, seawater desalination, nuclear engineering, and the production of biofuels.⁷

The low recycling rate and the need for the extraction of additional elements such as chrome and nickel make higher grades of steel more energy-intensive to produce. For example, stainless steel production requires almost 80 GJ per ton, four times more than the production of plain carbon steel.⁷²³ The continuous development of higher-grade steels is stimulated by environmental legislation (such as the use of lighter steel in cars) and by competition from other materials, mainly aluminum and plastic composites.⁷⁹²³²⁵ Ironically, the competition with these materials, which consume even more energy, makes steel less and less sustainable.

Steel and renewable energy

The steel industry is heavily dependent on the energy supply, but the energy supply is also heavily dependent on the steel industry. Almost 10% of the global steel output goes into building and maintaining energy supply infrastructure. That amount corresponds to the entire steel output in 1950. A great share of that steel goes to gas and oil infrastructure.²⁷. Oil and gas mining, production, and transportation require steel for offshore drilling platforms, pipelines, refineries, tankers, and storage tanks. Coal mining depends on steel for cutters, loaders, conveyors, excavators, and trucks.⁷

Unfortunately, the planned switch to low-carbon energy sources and the electrification of heating and transport technologies will not decrease our dependency on the steel industry – on the contrary. A low-carbon power grid requires much more steel (and other materials) than an infrastructure based on fossil fuels. Wind and solar power are very diffuse power sources compared to fossil fuels. Therefore, it takes much more materials (and land) to produce the same energy. In jargon, wind and solar have low “power density” or high “material intensity.”²⁸²⁹³⁰³¹³²

A low-carbon power grid requires much more steel than an infrastructure based on fossil fuels.

The “steel intensity” of thermal gas and coal power plants is between 50 and 60 tonnes of steel per megawatt of installed power.³³ Hydroelectric power plants have a lower steel intensity, with 20-30 tonnes of steel per MW.⁷³³ Atomic power’s steel intensity is also lower at between 20 and 40 tonnes of steel per installed MW.³³³⁴ On the other hand, solar PV requires between 40 and 170 tonnes of steel per installed MW.³³³⁵ Although there is little or no steel in the solar panels themselves, it’s the material of choice for the structures that support them.

Steel and wind power

The most steel-intensive power source – by far – is the modern wind turbine. The steel intensity of a wind turbine depends on its size. A single, large wind turbine requires significantly more steel per megawatt of installed power than two smaller wind turbines.³⁶ For example, a 3.6 MW wind turbine with a 100-meter tall tower requires 335 tons of steel (83 tons/MW), while a 5 MW wind turbine with a 150-meter tall tower needs 875 tons of steel (175 tons/MW).³⁷ The trend is towards taller wind turbines and a higher steel intensity.

Image: Steel towers for wind turbines in the port of Rotterdam. Image: Melle Smets.

Steel consumption further increases for offshore wind turbines. Onshore wind power plants rely on reinforced concrete for their foundations, but offshore wind turbines need massive steel structures such as monopiles and jackets.³⁸ The steel intensity for offshore wind turbines is calculated to be around 450 tonnes per MW for a 5 MW turbine – eight times higher than the steel intensity of a thermal power plant.³⁶. As these wind turbines get taller and move into deeper waters, their steel use further increases.

The most popular offshore wind turbine nowadays has a capacity of 7 MW, while the largest ones have a capacity of 14 MW.³⁶ If we make a conservative estimate based on the data above (the steel intensity doubles for every doubling of the power capacity), a 14 MW offshore wind turbine would require 1,300 tons of steel per MW or 18,200 tonnes in total. Such a wind turbine thus consumes 24 times more steel than a coal or gas power plant of the same power capacity.

Shorter life expectancy

The difference between renewable power sources and fossil fuels becomes even larger if the steel intensity is calculated per unit of energy rather than power (MWh instead of MW). In contrast to coal and gas power plants, the output of wind and solar power plants depends on the weather, and they do not always produce their maximum power capacity. Therefore, replacing 1 MW of fossil electricity generation capacity requires the installation of (on average) 4 MW of solar power or 2 MW of wind power.³⁹ A 14 MW offshore wind turbine thus has a steel intensity that is almost 50 times higher than a fossil fuel power plant for every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced.⁴⁰

A 14 MW offshore wind turbine has a steel intensity that is almost 50 times higher than a fossil fuel power plant for every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced.

Solar and wind power plants also have shorter lifetimes (20-30 years) compared to thermal power plants (30-60 years).³¹ While this does not affect the steel intensity per MW of power installed, it again increases the steel intensity per unit of energy produced over time. That does not always lead to a doubling of steel use because foundations for offshore wind turbines and structures for solar panels may have longer lifetimes than the power sources they support and could thus be reused.⁴¹

Power transmission infrastructure

The data above only include the steel used in the power plants themselves. For fossil fuel power plants, they do not include the steel used in the pipelines, oil rigs, coal excavators, and the like. However, the same goes for the low-carbon power sources. Because they need much more resources than thermal power plants (steel but also other metals and materials), they depend on a global mining and transport infrastructure that is just as steel-intensive as the supply chain for fossil fuels.

Furthermore, because they are more diffuse power sources with intermittent and unpredictable power production, often located far away from energy consumption centers, renewable power plants drive the expansion of transmission infrastructure. That infrastructure is also based on steel – from switchyard equipment over towers to conduction cables.²⁸²⁹³⁰³¹³²⁴²

Finally, low-carbon power sources also have a high need for special grades of steel, which are more energy-intensive to produce. Steel for off-shore wind turbines should resist corrosion, and stainless steel is increasingly used for solar panel support structures.⁴³ Electrical lamination steel (iron-silicon) is indispensable for transformers in the power network.⁷ Nuclear power plants may have a relatively low steel intensity but are completely built up of energy-intensive specialty steels. For example, cladding the fuel elements containing fissionable uranium requires zirconium steel, while all structural elements contain austenitic stainless steel.⁷⁴⁴

Low carbon grid cannot be made from recycled steel

The high steel intensity of low carbon power sources confronts us with a so-called “catch-22”, a situation in which there seems to be no escape from a problem no matter what we do. We need much more steel if we replace thermal power plants with renewable ones. Because there is not enough steel scrap available, we can only produce that extra steel from iron ore in blast furnaces burning fossil fuels. To address climate change, we need to build low-carbon sources quickly and in great numbers. However, to achieve circular material flows and build low-carbon power sources from scrap and renewable electricity, we would have to do the opposite: slow down the development of a low-carbon power grid.

Image: Steel foundations for off-shore wind turbines. Image by Glen Wallace, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

A well-cited study from 2013 concluded that if wind and solar power would supply 25,000 Twh of electricity – which corresponds to total global electricity demand in 2021 – we need about 3,200 Mt of steel to build the power plants alone.³³⁴⁵ Global electricity demand is projected to grow to between 52,000 and 71,000 terawatt-hours in 2050, which would increase the extra steel demand to between 6,400 and 8,960 Mt.⁴⁶ Spread out over the lifetime of solar panels and wind turbines (25 years), we would have to produce 256 to 358 Mt extra steel per year to make wind turbines and solar panel structures – comparable to the steel demand for passenger cars (195 Mt) and other transportation modes (98 Mt) combined.

That is still a very optimistic estimation. Electricity demand only makes up around 20% of total energy demand. If the total energy demand (177,000 Twh in 2021) would be supplied by wind and solar, we would need 22,400 Mt of steel. That’s an extra 896 Mt steel per year – as much as the global production in the early 2000s. You could argue that electricity can be used more efficiently than fossil fuels, for example, in cars and heating systems. However, at the same time, total energy demand is expected to rise further, countering the gains made by increased energy efficiency.

The high-tech solutions

The steel industry counts on technological solutions to make steel production carbon neutral. One option is to replace coal by gas, an approach that is already common in the Middle East and North America. Gas-based steelmaking results in somewhat lower carbon emissions, but they are still much higher than in the case of the electric arc furnace. Therefore, most attention goes to hydrogen, which can replace purified coal (coke) as a reducing agent in a direct reduction shaft furnace.⁴⁷ However, hydrogen-based steelmaking does not offer an escape from the catch-22 because it further increases the need for a steel-intensive infrastructure.

The production of hydrogen is energy-intensive. It takes 50-55 kilowatt-hour to make 1 kg of hydrogen and 60 kg of hydrogen to make 1 ton of steel.⁴⁷ The production of 1 ton of steel from hydrogen thus consumes 3,000 kWh of electricity, which is ten times higher than the electricity use of an electric arc furnace making steel from scrap. Consequently, hydrogen-based steelmaking requires roughly ten times more wind turbines and solar panels than scrap-based steel production – and thus ten times more steel. On top of this comes the steel for building the pipelines and storage tanks that are part of the hydrogen infrastructure.

Image: Worker in a blast furnace. Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F079044-0020 / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Carbon capture and storage, in which the carbon emissions of steelmaking plants are captured and then stored underground, faces the same problems. It requires a steel infrastructure and extra energy, thus indirectly raising the use of fossil fuels. Reverting to older, preindustrial steelmaking processes is not the answer either. Today’s blast furnace is essentially still the blast furnace from earlier centuries, only much more energy efficient.⁷

The low-tech solutions

The picture painted above seems to offer little hope for carbon-neutral steelmaking and power production. However, there is a low-tech solution that could achieve it. We could adjust steel production to the available scrap supply both in quantity and quality. That would allow us to produce all steel from scrap in electric arc furnaces, dramatically reducing energy consumption and eliminating almost all carbon emissions. Of course, the intent should not be to replace steel with plastic composites and aluminum because they are even more energy-intensive to produce. The only solution is to reduce material use overall.

We could adjust steel production to the available scrap supply both in quantity and quality.

Reducing the steel output and using more common steel grades would not bring us back to the Bronze Age. As noted, global end-of-life ferrous scrap availability was approximately 450 Mt in 2021, which would allow us to produce roughly one-quarter of the current steel output. Furthermore, the scrap supply will continue to rise for the next 40 years, enabling us to produce more and more low-emission steel each year. By 2050, scrap availability is expected to rise to about 900 Mt, almost half of today’s global steel production.⁴⁸ All that extra steel could be invested in expanding the low-carbon power grid without raising emissions first.

There is a lot of room to reduce the steel intensity of modern society. All our basic needs – and more – could be supplied with much less steel involved. For example, we could make cars lighter by making them smaller. That would bring energy savings without the need for energy-intensive high-grade steel. We could replace cars with bicycles and public transportation so that more people share less steel. Such changes would also reduce the need for steel in the road network, the energy infrastructure, and the manufacturing industry. We would need fewer machine tools, shipping containers, and reinforced concrete buildings. Whenever steel intensity is reduced, the advantages cascade throughout the whole system. Preventing corrosion and producing steel more locally from local resources would also reduce energy use and emissions.¹⁰¹⁴

The continuous growth of the steel output – the increasing steel intensity of human society – makes sustainable steel production impossible. No technology can change that because it’s not a technological problem. Like forestry can only be sustainable if the wood demand does not exceed the wood supply, steel is sustainable or not depending on the balance between (scrap) supply and (steel) demand. We may not be able to escape the Iron Age, but we have an option to escape the catch-22 that inextricably links steel production with fossil fuels.⁴⁹

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Forthcoming article, Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine. Subscribe to Low-tech Magazine’s newsletter. ↩︎
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See, for example: Hatayama, Hiroki, et al. “Outlook of the world steel cycle based on the stock and flow dynamics.” Environmental science & technology 44.16 (2010): 6457-6463. This paper predicted steel demand to reach 1.8 billion tonnes only by around 2025. ↩︎
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About 5% of global steel is produced by a third method: gas-based direct iron reduction. These furnaces use gas instead of coal and have therefore lower carbon emissions. However, emissions are still much higher than in the case of the electric arc furnace. Gas-based steelmaking mainly happens in the Middle East and North America. ↩︎
He, Kun, and Li Wang. “A review of energy use and energy-efficient technologies for the iron and steel industry.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 70 (2017): 1022-1039. This source gives a value of 1-1.5 GJ/ton of crude steel. ↩︎ ↩︎
This also holds true for many other materials. See: “How circular is the circular economy?”, Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine, November 2018. https://qelnixcor.cloud/2018/11/how-circular-is-the-circular-economy/ ↩︎
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In the West, the expansion of steel use happened over a period of 150 years, in tandem with technological evolution. In contrast, China compressed this technological evolution in just a few decades: shipping and railways, electrification, steel buildings, the car and the airplane, the internet, and renewable power technologies. There are still large parts of the world where the steel intensity of society is very low, such as India and Africa. There is thus still a lot of room for the growth of the steel output. Source: Smil, Vaclav. Still the iron age: iron and steel in the modern world. Butterworth-Heinemann, 2016. ↩︎
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Gervásio, Helena, et al. “Comparative life cycle assessment of tubular wind towers and foundations–Part 2: Life cycle analysis.” Engineering structures 74 (2014): 292-299. & Rebelo, Carlos, et al. “Comparative life cycle assessment of tubular wind towers and foundations–Part 1: Structural design.” Engineering structures 74 (2014): 283-291. ↩︎
Assessing the significance of steel to the global wind industry, S&P Global, Commodity Insights. December 2021. https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/ci/research-analysis/assessing-the-significance-of-steel-to-the-global-wind-industry.html ↩︎
Bolson, Natanael, Pedro Prieto, and Tadeusz Patzek. “Capacity factors for electrical power generation from renewable and nonrenewable sources.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119.52 (2022): e2205429119. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2205429119 ↩︎
This result corresponds well with Vidal, Olivier, Bruno Goffé, and Nicholas Arndt. “Metals for a low-carbon society.” Nature Geoscience 6.11 (2013): 894-896. The data are in the supplementary info: https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1993#Sec5 ↩︎
For off-shore wind turbines, the lifetime of the foundations is estimated to be 100 years, so in principle they could serve for replacement wind turbines of the same size. On the other hand, it is not self-evident that these steel foundations will eventually be recycled. First, only around 10% of decommissioning costs can be recovered by recycling the metal, meaning that it is not economically and perhaps even energetically interesting to do it. Second, in some cass marine life has flourished around the foundations. The four offshore wind farms that had been decomissioned in 2019 lasted for 15, 18, 20 and 26 years. Source: Topham, Eva, et al. “Recycling offshore wind farms at decommissioning stage.” Energy policy 129 (2019): 698-709. ↩︎
See https://www.fedsteel.com/insights/steels-role-in-the-us-power-infrastructure/ ↩︎
See https://industry.arcelormittal.com/products-solutions/Products_in_the_spotlight/magnelis ↩︎
Maziasz, Philip J., and Jeremy T. Busby. Properties of austenitic stainless steels for nuclear reactor applications. Oak Ridge National Lab.(ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States), 2012. ↩︎
Part of this has already been built. The researchers start from the solar and wind power production in 2013, which was 400 Twh, while both power sources produced 2,894 Twh in 2021. ↩︎
Electricity consumption worldwide from 2000 to 2022, with a forecast for 2030 and 2050, by scenario. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1426308/electricity-consumption-worldwide-forecast-by-scenario/#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20recent%20forecast,on%20the%20energy%20transition%20scenario ↩︎
Bhaskar, Abhinav, et al. “Decarbonizing primary steel production: Techno-economic assessment of a hydrogen based green steel production plant in Norway.” Journal of Cleaner Production 350 (2022): 131339. ↩︎ ↩︎
Scrap use in the steel industry, World Steel Association. May 2021. https://worldsteel.org/wp-content/uploads/Fact-sheet-on-scrap_2021.pdf ↩︎
Another motivation for reducing the steel intensity of modern society is to limit the consequences of geopolitical conflicts. The more steel we produce for peaceful purposes, the more steel becomes available for war and destruction. Remarkably, the production of military equipment is absent from modern steel statistics, and if mentioned, its share is very low. However, in times of war, steelmaking facilities switch to producing steel for military purposes. The steel industry can thus be converted into a weapons industry at any moment, and there is now a lot more steel production capacity available than there has ever been in history. ↩︎

What if We Replace Guns and Bullets with Bows and Arrows?

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Image: University of Chicago students practice archery. Image by Bardon, Emmet. [University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center](http://photoarchive.lib.uchicago.edu/db.xqy?one=apf4-00009.xml).

Why did firearms and bullets replace bows and arrows? To many, this sounds like a stupid question with an obvious answer: the firearm succeeded the bow because it’s a superior weapon. Let’s investigate.

Strength and skills

Hand-held firearms are usually assessed or compared in terms of performance characteristics such as lethality, range, and rate of fire. However, if we apply the same criteria to bows, two difficulties quickly present themselves. First, the performance of the bow depends on the archer’s strength. The bow is a human-powered weapon and thus only as powerful as the archer who draws it. That is not the case with the firearm, where the energy comes from explosives, and the shooter’s strength is of little importance.

The force required to pull a specific bow is typically measured in pounds (lbs) and expressed as the bow’s “draw weight.” Nowadays, most recreational archers and bow hunters shoot bows with a draw weight of 30 to 70 lbs. The effort to draw such a bow corresponds to lifting a weight of 15 to 35 kg. ¹ Similar draw weights seem to have been quite common throughout (pre)history, both for hunting and warfare. However, some archers used bows with higher draw weights. For example, during the heydays of the longbow in medieval England, the draw weight for war bows peaked between 100 and 140 pounds, with some archers shooting 200 pounds weapons. Composite bows had higher draw weights, too. ²³⁴⁵⁶

The bow is a human-powered weapon and thus only as powerful as the archer who draws it

Second, how the bow performs depends to a large extent on the skills of the archer. ⁴⁶⁷ Both the bow and the firearm require the shooter to develop aiming skills. However, the archer first has to master “pulling the trigger.” He or she needs to perform a sequence of actions flawlessly to make an accurate shot even possible. A slight variation in body posture or a jerky string release is enough to make the arrow go off the mark. In comparison, pulling the trigger of a firearm requires less practice. Aiming is more difficult with a bow than with a firearm as well. Unless the target is very close, the archer needs to compensate for gravity and shoot the arrow in an arc – hence the word archery. ⁸ Because bullets travel much faster than arrows, a gunner can aim in a straight line, which is easier.

Preindustrial bow vs. modern firearm

For reasons that will become clear, I compare the modern firearm to the preindustrial bow, not the modern bow. I include self-bows (made from a single stave of wood) and composite bows (which consist of layers of different materials, usually wood, horn, and sinew). Furthermore, I assume that a relatively strong and skillful archer draws the bow. We have a pretty accurate picture of what premodern archers and their weapons could accomplish, thanks to written resources, archeological evidence, and scientific experiments with replicas of preindustrial weapons.

1. Lethality

The lethality of a weapon is the capacity to cause death or harm. Every weapon can kill, but some are more likely to do so than others. The lethality of firearms is often defined by calculating momentum and kinetic energy of bullets. These concepts from physics indicate the ability of bullets to penetrate a target. Penetration increases with the projectile’s speed and weight. Bullets travel faster than arrows, but arrows are heavier than bullets. ⁹

Nevertheless, if you calculate the momentum and kinetic energy of arrows, even the most potent bow seems much less lethal than a firearm. When shot from a 170 lbs war bow, an arrow’s kinetic energy is only 96 foot-pounds, compared to 117 foot-pounds for a bullet fired from a small 0.22LR caliber pistol, 383 foot-pounds for a round fired from a 9 mm caliber pistol, and 1,300 to 2,800 foot-pounds for a projectile fired from a rifle. ¹⁰ The difference for momentum is smaller, but bullets clearly win in both cases.

Arrows are much more energy efficient than bullets. The shape of an arrow – unlike that of a bullet – favors penetration.

However, arrows are much more energy efficient than bullets. The shape of an arrow – unlike that of a bullet – favors penetration. Because of its elongated shape, an arrow’s mass per cross-sectional area (the sectional density) is much higher than in the case of a bullet. ¹¹¹²¹³ Consequently, an arrow requires much less momentum and kinetic energy to penetrate tissue to the same depth as a bullet. There is no need for a 170 pounds war bow – a bow with a draw weight of 45 lbs can kill almost any creature on this planet. Medieval English longbow archers only used such high draw weights because their arrows had to penetrate thick steel plate armor, which became common in the 1400s. ⁶⁴

Image. Because of its elongated shape, an arrow's mass per cross-sectional area (the sectional density) is much higher than in the case of a bullet. Image credit: [Tim Ormsby](https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10159086965037194&set=g.161983523940600).

However, bullets do more damage when they hit the target. Arrows penetrate tissue by slicing and cutting, similar to the damage done by a dagger or a knife. Consequently, injury is limited to the tissue incised by direct contact with the arrowhead. In contrast, bullets penetrate tissue by brute force, which can cause significant damage to tissue and organs not directly touched by the projectile. This effect becomes more pronounced as bullet caliber and speed increase and is most noticeable with rifles. ⁹¹¹¹²¹⁴¹⁵

Based on wound damage alone, one could thus argue that bullets are more lethal than arrows. Small caveat, though: if the archer is skillful enough to hit vital body parts, an arrow can be just as lethal. The gunner, on the other hand, doesn’t need to aim so precisely to make a kill. Furthermore, it can be difficult – and sometimes impossible – to remove arrowheads from a victim’s body, even in a modern healthcare context. ¹¹ Arrowheads tend to get stuck into bones, and war arrowheads often had barbs that complicated removal. ¹⁶

2. Range

Range distinguishes a missile weapon from a melee weapon (used in close combat). The person holding the weapon with the most range can hit the other while the other cannot hit back. In hunting, range makes it less likely that the hunter gets killed. The maximum range of a weapon defines how far you can shoot a missile, and the effective range marks how far you can cast it with sufficient accuracy and hitting power.

Conveniently, a bowshot was a common measure of distance. In England, it was eventually standardized at 204 yards (187 meters). ⁶ Being a standard, this was not the range obtained by stronger archers, who used bows with higher draw weights. ² Historical sources from the middle ages put the maximum range of a war longbow between 200 and 400 yards (183-366 meters). ⁴⁶ The current record with an English longbow, established in 2017, is 412.82 m. ¹⁷ Composite horse bows obtained longer ranges, between 300 and 530 meters. ¹⁸ The current record, established in 2019, stands at 566.83 meters. ¹⁹²⁰

Unlike a bullet, an arrow remains lethal during its entire flight

Modern firearms have a much greater maximum range than preindustrial bows. However, their effective range is similar, at least for pistols and guns (not so for rifles). For example, the maximum range of a Beretta M9 handgun – a US military weapon – is 1,800 meters, but its effective range is only 50 meters. The US Army defines the effective range of a firearm as the maximum range at which an average soldier can hit a stationary, torso-sized target with an accuracy of 51%. I could not find similar data for archers, but the available information suggests that the bow can obtain a similar accurate range.

For example, a study of a 1916 archery competition in New Jersey – when archers still shot wooden self-bows – revealed the accuracy of the five best archers, each shooting a total of 90 arrows from three different distances: 40, 50, and 60 yards (37, 46 and 55 meters). The target measured 121 cm in diameter (the typical practice target), not a human torso but a comparable size. The percentage of arrows that hit the target was 98% at 37m, 96% at 46m, and 88% at 55m. ²¹²²

Image: English singer, poet, and archer Ingo Simon shooting a Turkish composite bow. Via [Bow International](https://www.bow-international.com/features/long-distance-shooting-a-brief-history/).

Comparing the range of bows and firearms is far from straightforward. Bullets travel very fast initially (almost 3,000 km/h) but quickly lose speed along their trajectory. In contrast, an arrow travels relatively slowly (150-250 km/h) but loses very little speed. ²³ The same characteristics that make it easily penetrate a target also help to penetrate the air. Furthermore, unlike bullets, arrows fly – they are among the first applications of aeronautics, thousands of years before the invention of the airplane. ⁹²⁴

As a consequence, an arrow remains lethal during its entire flight, even at maximum range. Stronger still, its lethality increases if shot at an angle of 45 degrees, compared to shooting at medium range. ⁴⁶⁹²⁵ The arrow will gain speed – and thus momentum and kinetic energy – on its way down. In contrast, when you shoot a bullet in an arc for maximum range, it will have lost so much speed that it’s unlikely to be lethal when it hits the ground. ²⁶ A bullet not only needs more momentum and kinetic energy to penetrate a target. It also requires more speed to compensate for its inferior aerodynamics.

Although the accurate range of bows is smaller than that of rifles (which can be effective up to a distance of several hundreds of meters or more), the maximal cast of powerful bows equals the effective range of some rifles. As we shall see later, unlike recreational archers in the West today, preindustrial archers routinely practiced their skills at the ultimate range of their weapons. ²⁷

3. Rate of fire

The rate of fire determines how many projectiles a weapon can launch in a given time frame. The higher the rate of fire, the higher the chance that one of the projectiles will hit the target.

When visiting a modern archery shooting range, one gets the impression that bows have a much lower rate of fire than firearms. However, modern archery is 100% focused on millimeter accuracy. Aiming is a slow process that often involves fiddling with instruments and looking through sights – many modern bows are essentially sniper weapons. Previously, archers aimed intuitively, with both eyes open and fixed on the target. Intuitive aiming requires more skill – it depends on eye-body coordination, like throwing a stone – but it can be just as accurate and has the obvious advantage of speed.

Medieval English archers had to be able to shoot 10 to 12 well-aimed arrows per minute – one shot every 5 to 6 seconds. ⁶⁹²⁸ The best longbow archers could launch up to 30 missiles per minute – one every two seconds. ²⁹ This is comparable to the sustained rate of fire for semi-automatic firearms – between 12 and 15 rounds per minute. ³⁰ The sustained rate of fire includes the time it takes to aim, reload, and prevent overheating and malfunctioning of the firearm. For the bow, it depends on the dexterity, strength and endurance of the archer.

In the hands of skillful and strong archers, bows can produce a similar rate of fire as semi-automatic weapons, and they can outperform guns and pistols

Firearms can surpass their sustained rate of fire for a short time, ignoring the time for cooling down the weapon. Most semi-automatic weapons (which fire one bullet for each pull of the trigger) obtain a rapid rate of fire of about 45 rounds per minute. If there is no need to reload ammunition, the rate of fire can increase even further. The average shooter can fire a semi-automatic handgun at a rate of about 2 to 3 bullets per second while pointing at a single stationary target. However, military training aims to produce a well-aimed shot every one to two seconds. ³⁰

Composite bow archers, in particular, developed ways of shooting that could compete with the rapid rate of fire for semi-automatic weapons. Horse archers launched arrows with a thumb draw, which differs from the Mediterranean draw used by self-bow (and modern) archers. The horse archer put the projectile on the other side of the bow (right side if right-handed) and pressed it against the string with a thumb ring. The thumb draw allows you to nock and launch with one continuous movement. Some Native Americans used the pinch draw – which had similar advantages. ³¹

Image. A Manchu archer shooting a composite bow with a thumb release. Source: Klopsteg, Paul Ernest. \"Turkish archery and the composite bow: a review of an old chapter in the chronicles of archery and a modern interpretation.\" (1947).

Image. The thumb draw. Source: Klopsteg, Paul Ernest. \"Turkish archery and the composite bow: a review of an old chapter in the chronicles of archery and a modern interpretation.\" (1947).

For short bursts of fire, composite bow archers kept extra arrows in their bow or string hand, allowing a higher rate of fire than when pulling arrows from a quiver. The fastest way of shooting involved laying up to five arrows on the bow parallel to each other, nocking each one consecutively. Lars Anderson, a Danish archer who revived the interest in Asian archery in the West in recent years, shoots up to ten aimed arrows in just 5 seconds – two per second. Anderson also manages to shoot three arrows in just 0.6 seconds after putting them ready on the bow. ³²

4. Ammunition supply

In the hands of skillful and strong archers, bows can thus produce a similar rate of fire as semi-automatic weapons, and they can outperform guns and pistols. However, they cannot compete with automatic firearms (machine guns), which fire bullets as long as the shooter presses and holds the trigger. The machine gun appeared in the 1860s and can fire 30 rounds in just two seconds. ³⁰

Furthermore, most archers will run out of ammunition faster than gunners. English longbow archers carried a maximum of about 25-50 arrows with them, which would all be gone after shooting a few minutes at maximal rate of fire. In contrast, US soldiers take seven magazines with a total supply of 200 bullets. ³⁰ On their campaign in France, English archers were followed by dozens of supply wagons with spare arrows. ⁶

Parthian horse archers operated with a camel supply of more than 1,000 animals loaded with spare arrows

Horse archers carried more ammunition, from 60 to 80 arrows and up to 400 arrows in saddleside quivers. Their tactics were also aimed at keeping the enemy on the move, which facilitated the collection and reuse of their arrows. Horse archers could quickly ride to the supply train and back. Parthian horse archers, who defeated the Roman army several times, operated with a camel supply of more than 1,000 animals loaded with spare arrows. ²⁵

5. Stealth & handling

A weapon’s size and the space required to use it also determine its performance. Preindustrial bows were featherlight (around 500 g) but larger than modern firearms, and the archer needed more elbow room to launch a projectile. A gun or rifle can be shot from almost any position, while a self-bow is most effective when the archer is standing. That makes it harder for the archer to conceal himself and makes the weapon unpractical in some environments. Its size and light weight also makes the bow an inferior melee weapon. Archers usually carried a sword for hand-to-hand combat. ⁸ In contrast, the modern firearm works as a ranged and melee weapon.

Image: A archer prepares to launch an arrow while huddled on the ground. Photo by Rudolph Martin Anderson, 1916, Canadian Museum of History. CC BY-SA 4.0.

On the other hand, the composite bow is much shorter than the self-bow. The thumb release gives the archer flexibility to be able to shoot to any direction and nearly in any position. There are also historical examples of small “pocket bows” with short draw lengths, lethal only at short range. ³³ Furthermore, although the size of some bows makes it harder for the archer to conceal himself, bows partly compensate for this by being silent. The sound of a gunshot immediately gives away the position of the shooter.

When inferiority ruled: early firearms

When comparing the performance characteristics of preindustrial bows and modern firearms, it’s tempting to conclude that firearms replaced bows because they are indeed technologically superior. The difference in performance may not be as big as many people would have suspected. But even the most skillful archers from the middle ages could not compete with all types of modern firearms, especially not with rifles and machine guns.

However, bows became obsolete centuries before the advance of modern firearms. On the Europen continent, firearms – first the arquebus, then the musket – became the dominant hand-held missile weapons from the 1500s onwards. ⁹³⁴ The reason could not have been a better technical performance, because preindustrial firearms were in almost every respect inferior to bows. Firearms only matched bows in technical performance between the 1850s and the 1900s, thanks to industrial manufacturing methods. ⁹²⁵

Image: Men firing muskets. Credit: Edd Scorpio, Wikimedia commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The only technical advantage of early firearms was their lethality. Just like today, a bullet did more damage than an arrow. ³⁵³⁶ However, unlike today, actually hitting the target was quite a challenge. Compared to bows, early firearms were inaccurate, had a short range, and a low rate of fire. Before the twentieth century, gunners received no training at all because firearms were inaccurate, even in the hands of experienced shooters. ²⁸ As late as 1793 – after roughly 300 years of use on the battlefield – a series of trials in England showed that the musket was less accurate than the longbow. ³⁵ Around the same period, Benjamin Franklin considered arming American Revolutionary soldiers with longbows because they were more efficient than muskets. ⁴²⁵²⁸³⁷

As late as 1793 – after roughly 300 years of use on the battlefield – a series of trials in England showed that the musket was less accurate than the longbow

The main weakness of early firearms – and the last one to be solved – was their low rate of fire. The musketeer had to follow a series of manual steps for every shot. ³⁵ In the time a man needed to load his musket and fire one round, a skillful archer could launch up to a dozen arrows towards him. During the US Civil War (1861-1865), the range of rifles had become similar to the range of war bows (200-300 yards), but the rate of fire was still as low as three bullets per minute. ⁹ Preindustrial firearms were also unreliable, while bows seldom failed. Even in the late 1700s, roughly 15% of musket shots misfired, increasing to 90% in wind and rain. Finally, a musket was as long as a bow and much heavier (7-9kg). ³⁷

Image: A 17th century Dutch musket. Source: [Rijksmuseum, image in the public domain](https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/NG-NM-3546).

Image: An English Civil War manual of the New Model Army showing a part of the steps required to load and fire an earlier musket. [Image in the Public Domain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket#/media/File:Manual_of_the_Musketeer,_17th_Century.jpg).

The firearm also had tactical disadvantages. First, while the flat trajectory of bullets made aiming easier, it also meant that the volume of fire was limited further. ⁴⁶ Archers could stand in deep formations and shoot simultaneously with several ranks at once – the archers in the back shooting over the heads of those in front. This technique, called “volley shooting”, had been in use since Antiquity. ²⁵ In contrast, only two ranks of musketeers could shoot simultaneously (one rank kneeling, the other standing). Likewise, musketeers could only target the front ranks of an enemy force, and they could not lob their projectiles over a castle wall.

Second, archers could kill indirectly (and cause a lot of destruction) with fire arrows. These were slightly longer projectiles that carried combustible materials. Some types were for immediate use, while others required preparation in the field. ⁴³⁸ Their effect could be devastating in a time when people made buildings and ships from flammable materials. Defensive forces could set fire to supply wagons or siege engines of attacking armies. ⁶ Horse archers ignited the high grasses of the steppes to stop opposing troops. ³⁴ Using fire arrows, bows were “firearms”, too.

The crossbow

The firearm was not the first weapon to replace the bow. On the European continent, the crossbow became the dominant missile weapon in warfare by the 1200s. Early firearms then largely superseded crossbows in the 1500s. ⁴⁶ The crossbow, around since Ancient times, is a human-powered spring just like the bow. However, its operation is very much like that of a firearm. The projectile is locked in place, and the shooter only needs to aim to make an accurate shot. The crossbowman tensions the weapon through different mechanisms, like a stirrup, a double crank windlass, or a pulley system.

Image: crossbow with ammunition. Germany, 16th-17th century. Wood, leather, steel; overall: 37.2 cm (14 5/8 in.). Source: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1916.1758-crossbow-bolt).

People often consider the crossbow technically superior to the bow, and that it largely replaced the bow in Europe only seems to confirm this. However, a comparison of the performance characteristics shows two equally valid weapons, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. A crossbow bolt was more powerful than an arrow, making it better suited for piercing armor. ³⁹ Furthermore, a crossbowman needed less elbow room and could wear heavier body armor that would have interfered with the operation of a bow. ⁸ However, the crossbow was very heavy and its rate of fire was just as low as that of a firearm. Neither were crossbows suited for launching missiles in an arc.

When we compare the performance of the crossbow to that of the early firearm, a curious observation follows: the crossbow is clearly the superior weapon. It shared the low rate of fire with the early firearm, but at least the crossbow had an accuracy, range, and reliability that could match the bow. The crossbow was also relatively silent in operation and did not produce smoke (as all early firearms did). And yet, the firearm replaced the crossbow, not the other way around. Consequently, contrary to what most people assume, the bow and the crossbow were not succeeded by weapons that were superior in their technical performance. The opposite happened. Between 1400 and 1900, European armies replaced first-rate weapons by inferior weapons.

Taking the skill and effort out of killing someone

Looking at performance characteristics alone, the evolution of hand-held missile weapons in Europe seems to make little sense. Differences in manufacturing techniques don’t seem to explain it either. Bullets were cheaper to produce than arrows, but self-bows were more economical to make than firearms. The sequence from bow to crossbow and firearm makes more sense when we compare these weapons in terms of their learnability. The crossbowman only needed to aim well and could shoot in a straight line instead of an arc, which made the crossbow simpler to use than the bow. It also required less muscular strength than the bow, but the crossbow was still a human-powered weapon. The firearm did away with that.

Rather than being technically superior weapons, firearms took the skills and muscular effort out of killing someone from a distance

Rather than being technically superior weapons, firearms took the skills and muscular effort out of killing someone from a distance. The main reason most European armies switched from bows to crossbows and then firearms was the short learning curves of these weapons. Crossbowmen and musketeers required little or no training, while it took many years of practice to build an archer skillful and strong enough to be of use in warfare. ⁴⁶⁷⁸⁴⁰⁴¹ The crossbow and the firearm thus expanded the number of people in a given population that could become soldiers. That was great news for those in power because they could now build large armies quickly.

Archery practice

The importance of learnability is easy to forget nowadays because firearms are extremely easy to operate. With a machine gun, it’s not even necessary to aim well. In contrast, putting together and maintaining an army of archers required a lot of effort. Wherever the bow was an important weapon on the battlefield, archery practice was part of daily life. A well-documented example is England, where the longbow was retired from military service only in 1595 – roughly 400 years after most European armies had switched to crossbows and a century after the advance of early firearms.

Image: High school archery practice, 1962. Source: The Newark Public Library. [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/NewarkSchools1962).

The English crown forced its entire male population to practice archery. Legislation started in the 1250s and became increasingly strict in the centuries that followed. ⁴⁶⁴²⁴³⁸ All men between the ages of 17 and 60 had to own a longbow and were obliged to practice on Sundays and festive days. Parents had to provide boys with a bow and arrows by age seven. Other sports as football, tennis, and handball, were outlawed to eliminate distractions from archery practice.

Wherever the bow was an important weapon on the battlefield, archery practice was part of daily life

The principal mode of archery practice was shooting at the butts. These were mounds of earth, stone, and peat situated on common land that measured up to 200 meters long. These shooting grounds (known as butts, too) could be in the open countryside, within towns and villages, or on land adjoining castles or forts. ⁴⁶⁴⁴ Archery practice also involved prick or clout shooting, which is the art of shooting an arrow in a large arc and dropping it into a target from above at maximum range. This trained archers in volley shooting. Another form of practice was shooting at the popinjay, almost straight up into the sky. This trained archers for sieges and naval battles, where they had to hit targets high in the rigging of enemy ships.

In horse archer cultures, the type of practice was different, reflecting more mobile tactics on the battlefield. ²⁵ The most typical military training in composite bow cultures were games where archers ran their horses over specially designed tracks, shooting sideways, backward, and up in the air at consecutive targets along both sides of the route. A 17th-century Ottoman archery manual of military horsemanship described nearly 20 different drills, sometimes combining the bow and the sword. ⁴ Many nomadic people taught their children to ride animals and shoot bows from a very young age. ³⁷

Image: A Mongolian child archer. Credit: [Nasanbat Nasaa](https://www.facebook.com/groups/123478431067128/user/100000273387588/). Via [Traditional Manchu Archery](https://www.facebook.com/groups/fedoro).

Image: A Mongolian horse archer. Credit: [Nasanbat Nasaa](https://www.facebook.com/groups/123478431067128/user/100000273387588/). Via [Traditional Manchu Archery](https://www.facebook.com/groups/fedoro).

For many centuries, archery was a religious duty and a sign of status in the Islamic Crescent, from Turkey to India. It developed as a martial art and a ritual practice that supported social order and spiritual development in China, Japan, Mongolia, and Korea. ⁴⁵⁴⁶ The focus was not just on accuracy and range but also on rapid shooting, endurance, and shooting from awkward positions. For example, a particular practice in Japan was to launch arrows while kneeling at a target 131 yards away, despite the obstacle of a low overhanging roof. Another challenge was hitting a target repeatedly over a sustained period. In 1686, one archer shot 13,053 arrows over 24 hours (9 per minute), of which 8,133 hit the mark (more than five arrows per minute). ⁴

Modern bows have taken part of the skill – and much of the fun – out of archery as a sport. ⁴⁷ A contemporary recurve bow with sight is accurate even in the hands of absolute beginners. When shooting across greater distances, instruments help the archer to launch the projectile with the correct ballistic trajectory. Often, the fingers do not even touch the bowstring. There’s a mechanical release between the string and the fingers, and the archer pulls a trigger. The Olympic recurve bow adds stabilizers for better aiming. The compound bow, the most popular bow for hunting, has a system of cams from which the bowstring unwinds, which reduces the strength that the archer needs to hold the bow at full draw.

The cannon

When the English eventually gave up archery, it was only after much debate. ⁶²⁵³⁷ The English longbow, being such a versatile weapon, was not defeated by the hand-held firearm alone. It was made obsolete by a new artillery weapon, the cannon. Large groups of longbowmen standing close together were an easy target when artillery became more mobile and effective. ⁴⁴³ The composite bow (and the crossbow) held out much longer against the firearm and the cannon. ³⁵⁴⁵⁴⁸⁴⁹ In China, archery disappeared from military training only in 1901 – roughly the time that firearms had finally achieved the same performance as bows. ⁵⁰

In China, archery disappeared from military training only in 1901 – roughly the time that firearms had finally achieved the same performance as bows

Since the Greeks and the Romans, European warfare made relatively little use of missile weapons. Battles were mostly stationary melee fights: men bashing on each other with swords, lances, axes, pikes, halberds, and hammers. When bows and later firearms entered the battlefield, men kept standing in rigid lines, shooting into each other. ²⁵ Mounted warriors carried swords and lances, not bows and arrows. In contrast, Eastern warfare centered around large numbers of highly mobile horse archers who would never enter a melee fight. Horse archers galloped towards an enemy, launched a volley of arrows towards them at long range, and then quickly turned around and disappeared out of sight. Such dispersed hit-and-run forces were difficult to stop with cannons. ²⁵ ⁴⁹

European warfare: men standing in rigid lines, shooting into each other. Image depicts the battle of Agincourt (1415). Source: Antoine Leduc, Sylvie Leluc et Olivier Renaudeau (dir.), D'Azincourt à Marignan. Chevaliers et bombardes, 1415-1515, Paris, Gallimard / Musée de l'armée, 2015, p. 18-19, ISBN 978-2-07-014949-0

Image: Mongolian horse archers. Credit: [Nasanbat Nasaa](https://www.facebook.com/groups/123478431067128/user/100000273387588/). Via [Traditional Manchu Archery](https://www.facebook.com/groups/fedoro).

At the same time, horse archers were not interested in firearms or crossbows because their battle tactics depended on a high rate of fire. Those weapons would have forced them to completely revise their tactics, which had proven very successful – even against European cavalry with early firearms. ⁴⁹ Native American horse archers also killed European colonists far into the nineteenth century. In the hands of the horse archer, the bow only found defeat when it met the repeating rifle.

Sustainable violence?

Advocating for a revival of the bow and arrow – at the expense of the firearm – sounds absurd and unrealistic. But is it? Reintroducing the bow would only bring us benefits. It follows the same sound thinking behind other low-energy strategies, such as switching from cars to bicycles. The bike and the bow are both highly efficient, human-powered technologies that would be advantageous to human and planetary health.

First, reverting to the bow and arrow would be a pacifying move. If firearms made it possible for states to build larger armies and fight wider wars, then reverting to bows and arrows – and other historical missile weapons such as trebuchets, catapults, and ballistas – would bring us less extensive conflicts. It would decrease the number of people in a given population who could become effective soldiers (unless archery practice becomes ingrained in daily life again). A society that switches from cars to bicycles would similarly bring shorter travel distances and more local ways of life (unless people train by cycling dozens of kilometers per day).

Reverting to the bow and arrow would decrease the number of people in a given population who could become effective soldiers

Second, reverting to bows would make warfare less damaging to the environment. We don’t often assess weapons in terms of energy efficiency and sustainability. However, the production of firearms and bullets depends on an intricate global supply chain that involves infrastructures, factories, mines, and fossil fuels. So on top of the human suffering that firearms cause, they also pose a longer-term problem, just like other modern technologies.

On the other hand, bows and arrows can be hand-made from many natural and human-made local materials (See “When lethal weapons grew on trees”). Furthermore, artisanal production has an additional pacifying effect. Early firearms were hand-made products just like bows, and in both cases, the weapon supply was limited to what craftspeople could produce. With industrial manufacturing methods, these limits disappeared, facilitating large armies and extensive fighting.

Image: Outdoor archery practice at Palm Beach Junior College, 1950s. Source: Palm Beach State College Archives - Harold C. Manor Library - Lake Worth campus. [Found at Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/17-archery-outdoors-women).

Third, low-tech manufacturing methods based on local materials also provide military self-sufficiency – the condition in which a state (or another political organisation) is able to procure or produce domestically quantities and qualities of miliary supplies, raw materials, and equipment for its survival or its foreign policy goals in general. ³⁴ For example, modern ammunition depends on antimony, concentrated in China. Without it, we could not sustain the bullet speeds of today. ⁵¹⁵²

It’s possible to build firearms with more local, low-tech manufacturing methods, but these would not have the same performance characteristics. For example, the British Sten machine gun – an important weapon during World War Two – can be made in a bicycle shop using minimal welding and machining. However, it was a notoriously unreliable weapon, and its maximum range was only 100 meters, easily surpassed by a skillful archer. ⁵³

Image: A Sten gun. Source: Museum Rotterdam, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sten#/media/File:Stengun_verzet.jpg). CC BY 3.0.

Finally, replacing the firearm with the bow would reduce the damage done by missile weapons in a civilian setting, such as mass shootings, accidents, and suicides. In theory, a mass shooting could happen with a bow and arrows. However, it would take an archer years of dedicated practice, while a gunner can start out of the box. Bows are also much less likely to cause lethal accidents when not in use. Unlike firearms and crossbows, they cannot be carried and stored in a loaded position. ¹¹ Finally, the bow is a very unhandy weapon for suicide – it would require you to pull the string with your toes while aiming at yourself. ¹¹

Military technology leads by example

Even if you agree that reverting to the bow and arrow would bring advantages, you probably find it unrealistic. That may well be true, but in that case, it’s also unrealistic to make a transition to a more sustainable society. We cannot combine a low-tech lifestyle with high-tech weapons for several reasons.

First, military technology is one of the main drivers of technological progress. Many products that are destroying our environment were originally developed for military purposes. Second, the global supply chain that underpins modern firearms is at the heart of economic growth and all environmental problems. We cannot keep it working only for manufacturing weapons and dismantle it for all other purposes. Third, the capitalist system needs rising levels of military spending as an outlet for growing amounts of accumulated surplus capital. The global economy invests heavily and increasingly in warfare, conflict, and repression – high-tech weapons are big business. ⁵⁴ ⁵⁵ ⁵⁶

Image: High school archery practice, 1962. Source: The Newark Public Library. [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/NewarkSchools1964).

For all these reasons, rather than keeping weapons out of the sustainability discussion – they should be our focus. If we cannot imagine low-tech warfare, we cannot imagine a low-tech, sustainable, and fair society. Switching to low-tech weapons sounds unrealistic because it would require global cooperation, but the same holds for lowering the emissions from fossil fuels. Switching to low-tech weapons sounds unrealistic because it involves “uninventing” things, but this also applies to many other problematic everyday products.

Indeed, military technology is one of the few domains in which we have collectively decided not to use certain technologies. Humanity has banned many types of weapons in warfare, such as chemical and biological weapons, blinding laser weapons, and poisoned bullets. Meanwhile, no country has succeeded in outlawing SUVs, although their danger to other road users and the environment is well-known. As weird as it sounds, military technology leads by example.

A bow’s draw weight also depends on the size of the archer and the shooting style, which determine the draw length. The farther the archer can pull back the string, the more energy the bow’s limbs will store. Draw weight is typically measured at a draw length of 28 inches, but the same bow will be more potent in the hands of a taller archer. The same holds for the shooting style. Nowadays, most archers draw the bow string until the chin, while historical archers often drew the bowstring until the ear, the shoulder, or beyond – thus increasing the draw length and draw weight of the bow. ↩︎
Randall, Karl Chandler. Origins and Comparative Performance of the Composite Bow. Diss. University of South Africa, 2016. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/79170491.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Pontzer, Herman, et al. “Mechanics of archery among Hadza hunter-gatherers.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 16 (2017): 57-64. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352409X17303309 ↩︎
Loades, Mike. War Bows: Longbow, crossbow, composite bow and Japanese yumi. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Lower than average draw weights usually implied the use of poisoned arrows. ↩︎
Roth, Erik. With a Bended Bow: Archery in Mediaeval and Renaissance Europe. The History Press, 2011. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Nieminen, Timo A. “The Asian war bow.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.1677 (2011). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.1677.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎
Dougherty, Martin J. The Medieval Warrior: Weapons, Technology and Fighting Techniques: AD 1000-1500. Lyons Press, 2011. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Denny, Mark. Their arrows will darken the sun: the evolution and science of ballistics. JHU Press, 2011. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Muzzle_energy ↩︎
Karger, Bernd, et al. “Experimental arrow wounds: ballistics and traumatology.” Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery 45.3 (1998): 495-501. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Madhok, Brijesh M., Dipesh D. Dutta Roy, and Sashidhar Yeluri. “Penetrating arrow injuries in Western India.” Injury 36.9 (2005): 1045-1050. ↩︎ ↩︎
Ashby, Ed. “Momentum, kinetic energy, and arrow penetration (and what they mean for the bowhunter).” (2005): 1564244295094. https://www.arcieridelbernabo.it/wp-content/uploads/7-Ashby-Momentum-Kinetic-Energy-and-Arrow-Penetration.pdf ↩︎
MacPhee, Nichole, et al. “A comparison of penetration and damage caused by different types of arrowheads on loose and tight fit clothing.” Science & Justice 58.2 (2018): 109-120. ↩︎
The type of bullet or arrowhead also influences wound damage. Some bullets are designed to expand or fragment on impact, further spreading the damage and increasing the chance that a vital organ is damaged. ⁹ Likewise, broadhead arrowheads, which have razor-edged metal blades, cause extensive bleeding. ¹¹ On the other hand, field-tip points (which are used for target practice) typically do not cause bleeding until the arrow is removed, because the relatively small puncture wouund is filled by the shaft. ¹¹ ↩︎
Extracting arrows is one of the rare medical disciplines that was better developed in the past than it is today – few surgeons these days have experience with arrow wounds. There is a significant danger of injuries, including to the operating surgeon. ¹¹ The spoon of Diocles was an ancient medical instrument to extract arrows from the body without causing additional trauma. After enlargement of the wound, the instrument was used to follow the shaft and detect the arrowhead. The cups of the spoon then enclosed the arrowhead and pulled it out. Cornelius Celsus, who developed the surgical instrument, also wrote a chapter on the removal of arrows in his medical treatise, De medicina. In it, he proposed two ways to extract an arrow: extracting the arrow from the side where it entered the body (using the spoon of Diocles), and pushing or pulling it through the body after incision of the soft tissue at the opposite site. The second approach, which Celsus preferred if possible, involved tying the arrowhead to a horse, a bent stick, or a crossbow to pull it out. Sushruta, an Indian surgeon, reported such extraction methods already four millenia before Celsus. See: Karger, Bernd, Hubert Sudhues, and Bernd Brinkmann. “Arrow wounds: major stimulus in the history of surgery.” World journal of surgery 25.12 (2001): 1550-1555 & Karger, Bernd, et al. “Experimental arrow wounds: ballistics and traumatology.” Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery 45.3 (1998): 495-501. ↩︎
https://www.bow-international.com/features/long-distance-shooting-a-brief-history/ ↩︎
Chan, Hok-lam. “The Distance of a Bowshot”: Some Remarks on Measurement in the Altaic World." Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 25 (1995): 29-46. ↩︎
https://www.bow-international.com/features/long-distance-shooting-a-brief-history/ ↩︎
These distances refer to “normal” bows. Composite bow cultures are also keen on “flight shooting”, which involves special bows with very light arrows. These can fly for more than 1,000 meters far. ↩︎
Bettinger, Robert L. “Effects of the bow on social organization in Western North America.” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 22.3 (2013): 118-123. ↩︎
Another example illustrates the aiming skills of historical archers, even if it refers to a very short distance of only 10 yards. Turkish archers could surround a target the size of a coin with five or six arrows so that all of them were touching the outside of the target but none broke the border. ³⁵ In yet another example, antropological research in the 1920s observed that the best native American archers were able to hit a very small target – the size of a quarter – “regularly” from distances up to 25-35 metres. In a final example, Ishi, the last Yahi (Californian) Indian, in the early 20th century, shot a squirrel through the head at 40 yards. ²⁸ ↩︎
Arrows typically retain 75-80% of their initial velocity on impact, as well as 60-65% of kinetic energy. Source: Gorman, Stuart. The Technological Development of the Bow and Crossbow in Later Middle Ages. Diss. Trinity College Dublin, 2016. Refers to: Strickland, Matthew J., and Robert Hardy. The great warbow: from Hastings to the Mary Rose. Sutton, 2005. ↩︎
The throwstick is another example of prehistorical aeronautics: https://www.throwsticks.com/history-science ↩︎
Hurley, Vic. Arrows against steel: the history of the bow and how it forever changed warfare. Cerberus Books, 2011. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
The bullet can still do damage, but it’s unlikely to penetrate the target. Shooting a bullet (almost) straight up into the air is more dangerous. ↩︎
In Asia, archers still shoot at large distances. For example, the typical target distance in Korea is 145 metres, in Turkey 160-190m. ² ↩︎
Townsend, Joan B. “Firearms against native arms: a study in comparative efficiencies with an Alaskan example.” Arctic Anthropology (1983): 1-33. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Redmond, Gerald. “Longbow: A Social and Military History.” (1977): 121-124. ↩︎
Wallace, E. Gregory. “Assault weapon myths.” S. Ill. ULJ 43 (2018): 193. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
The pinch draw involves grasping the end of the arrow between the end of the straightened thumb and the first and second joint of the bent forefinger. Instead of nocks, these arrows are knobbed at the end. ↩︎
Lars Anderson’s feats are not uncontested, and he is controversial in the archery community. You will find some articles and videos written and made by archers who debunk his techniques or claims. However, while I support a critical attitude, I have also experienced that primitive archers and modern archers disagree about everything. Furthermore, Anderson’s skills have been recorded officially, be it for accuracy, not rate of fire: he entered the Guinness Book of Records after shooting seven consecutive arrows through a keyhole. https://www.odditycentral.com/news/archer-shoots-seven-arrows-through-10mm-keyhole-sets-world-record.html. Finally, horse archery still has skillful practitioners in many regions where the composite bow once played an important role. Those archers seem to shoot just as well as Lars Anderson. See for example this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utNOiSfyOD8 ↩︎
See page 139 in The Bowyer’s Bible, Volume 4, and pages 250 and 283-284 in Mike Loads’ book War Bows. ⁴ ↩︎
Esper, Thomas. “Military Self-Sufficiency and Weapons Technology in Muscovite Russia.” Slavic Review 28.2 (1969): 185-208. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Lanan, Nathan. “The Ottoman Gunpowder Empire and the Composite Bow.” The Gettysburg Historical Journal 9.1 (2010): 4. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Historically, arrows did not necessarily have to kill to have the desired effect. First, those who survived being shot with arrows (or early firearms) often succumbed to wound infection. ²⁸ Second, having an arrow stuck in your body is inconvenient, even if the wound is not lethal or problematic. Third, not every arrow had to kill. Blunt force against armor also wore an enemy out. Mike Loads, the author of several books on historical archery, dubbed arrows “steel-clad fists with a considerable range.” ⁴ ↩︎
Davies, Jonathan. “‘A COMBERSOME TYING WEAPON IN A THRONG OF MEN’: THE DECLINE OF THE LONGBOW IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND.” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 80.321 (2002): 16-31. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Various types of fire arrows existed. In the cage type, a wick of wool, hemp or tow, saturated with a flammable compound, was stuffed into a cage that formed the arrowhead. This type of fire arrow could be prepared in the field whenever the need arose. Archers carried push-fit cages, wicks, and combustable materials to convert a regular arrow into a fire arrow in an instant. In contrast, the bag type fire arrow had to be prepared in advance, but it was more reliable than the cage type, which had the tendency to extinguish during flight. In a bag type fire arrow, an extra long arrowhead was inserted through a sausage of incindiary materials, encased in a linen bag. See ⁴ and ⁶. ↩︎
Although the crossbow had a much higher draw weight (up to 1,000 lbs), this was partly compensated by a lower efficiency (roughly 40%) and a shorter draw length than the bow: an arrow is much longer than a crossbow bolt. ↩︎
Antropological research reveals that hunting performance with the bow and arrow peaks surprisingly late in life, after peaks in strength. Source: Edinborough, Kevan Stephen Anthony. Evolution of bow-arrow technology. University of London, University College London (United Kingdom), 2005. ↩︎
Grund, Brigid Sky. “Behavioral ecology, technology, and the organization of labor: How a shift from spear thrower to self bow exacerbates social disparities.” American Anthropologist 119.1 (2017): 104-119. ↩︎
https://www.longbow-archers.com/historylistdates.html ↩︎
Phillips, Gervase. “Longbow and hackbutt: weapons technology and technology transfer in early modern England.” Technology and Culture 40.3 (1999): 576-593. ↩︎ ↩︎
https://web.archive.org/web/20060905114227/http://www.eng-h.gov.uk/mpp/mcd/butts.htm MONUMENTS PROTECTION PROGRAMME, MONUMENT CLASS DESCRIPTION, ARCHERY BUTTS, JANUARY 1990 ↩︎
Grayson, Charles E., Mary French, and Michael John O’Brien. Traditional archery from six continents: the Charles E. Grayson collection. University of Missouri Press, 2007. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
https://web.archive.org/web/20151012222623/http://www.atarn.org/training/chinese_archery_bckgrnd.htm ↩︎
This is a recurrent theme in the Bowyer’s bible. Hamm, Jim. “The Traditional Bowyer’s Bible, Volume One / Two / Three / Four.” (1992-2008). ↩︎
Although the Ottoman Empire was a pioneer in the use of gunpowder for artillery and infantry, it kept using horse archers well into the 1550s – for about as long as the English kept their longbowmen. ³⁵ Muscovite Russia maintained horse archers to defend their southeastern borders against the Tartars until the end of the 1600s. ³⁴ In the Middle East, archery declined only by the turn of the 19th century, and East Asia transitioned to firearms only by the early twentieth century. ⁴⁵ In China, archery disappeared from military training in 1901 – roughly the time that firearms had finally achieved the same performance as bows. ⁵⁰ In China, the bow coexisted as a military weapon alongside firearms for almost a millenium. ↩︎
May, Timothy. “Nomadic Warfare before Firearms.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. 2018. https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/asianhistory/abstract/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-4 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Selby, Stephen. Chinese archery. Vol. 1. Hong Kong University Press, 2000. ↩︎ ↩︎
Leckie, Cameron. “Lasers or longbows?: a paradox of military technology.” Australian Defence Force Journal 182 (2010): 44-56. ↩︎
The US is heavily reliant on China and Russia for its ammo supply chain. Congress wants to fix that. Defense News, June 22, 2022. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/budget/2022/06/08/the-us-is-heavily-reliant-on-china-and-russia-for-its-ammo-supply-chain-congress-wants-to-fix-that/ ↩︎
Thompson, Leroy. The sten gun. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. ↩︎
Robinson, William I. The global police state. London: Pluto Press, 2020. ↩︎
Phillips, Peter. Giants: The global power elite. Seven Stories Press, 2018. ↩︎
Gregory, Anthony. “Rise of the warrior cop: The militarization of america’s police forces.” (2014): 271-275. ↩︎

When Lethal Weapons Grew on Trees

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Image: Tanimber islander with very large bow and arrow in leather armor, Dutch Indies. Source unknown.

Many bows and arrows ago

The bow is one of humanity’s most essential and fascinating technologies, perhaps only eclipsed by the controlled use of fire. Despite endless academic speculation on the subject for almost 200 years, we don’t know when archery originated. ¹ Bows and arrows were made from organic materials, which do not preserve for long. The oldest archaeological finds come from peat bogs, glaciers, and water-logged lake sediments – oxygen-free environments that prevent organic materials from decaying. ² In the 1930s, in Stellmoor, Germany, archaeologists found roughly 100 arrow shafts dated to between 8,000 and 10,000 BC. ³ The oldest bow came to light in the 1940s in Holmegaard, Denmark. Scientists dated it to between 6,500 and 7,000 BC.

The bow and arrow are much older than these records indicate. One reason is that prehistoric bows were of a very sophisticated design, a point we return to later. Second, archaeologists have unearthed much older projectile points. The arrowhead is the only part of the bow and arrow made of inorganic material and thus preserves much longer. However, it can be hard to distinguish arrowheads from projectile points used with other weapons, most notably the spearthrower or atlatl. ⁴⁵ While keeping this in mind, some studies have pushed back the date for the first bow and arrow use to between 35,000 and 70,000 years ago. ⁶ But even arrowheads cannot tell us the whole story because fire-hardened wooden points may have preceded bone and stone points.

Human powered springs

In mechanical terms, the bow is a spring made up of two flexible, elastic limbs held under tension by a string. When the archer pulls the string back, energy accumulates in the bow. When the archer releases the string, the energy transmits to the arrow, which flies out of the bow. The bow is a highly efficient technology: the arrow’s kinetic energy (usable energy) is close to the total energy expended. ⁷⁸ Arrows are also very efficient, much more so than bullets: they lose little speed in flight and require little energy to penetrate a target. ⁹

The bow is a highly efficient technology: the arrow’s kinetic energy is close to the total energy expended.

The bow and arrow is a missile (or ranged) weapon for striking from a distance. Simple missile weapons are launched using unassisted bodily force, for example, thrown stones, throw sticks, or hand-cast spears (“javelins”). Complex missile weapons interpose a launcher between the human and the missile. Such weapon systems include the bow as well as the sling, the blowgun, the spearthrower, and the firearm. ⁴ In the hands of a skillful and muscular archer, the (pre)historical bow was a powerful and accurate weapon. The firearm replaced the bow because it was easier to use, not because it was technically superior. ⁹

Diversity of bow designs

Our forebears have used the bow and arrow on every continent except Australia (where spearthrower and throw stick prevailed) and Antarctica. The large geographical distribution and long history led to a wide diversity of bow designs determined by the local circumstances – the available materials and tools, the landscape, the climate, the use of the weapon, the social context, and so on. All bows consisted of a stave and a string, but the materials, dimensions, forms, shooting styles, and other features varied considerably. ¹⁰¹¹ That is not the case with modern firearms, which are the same everywhere.

Essentially, there are two types of bows, opposites on a scale: the self-bow and the composite bow. Self-bows are made from a single stave of wood, while composite bows consist of several layers of various materials (usually wood, horn, and sinew). Other bows are somewhere in between. For example, laminated bows consist of several layers of the same material, and backed self-bows are hybrids between self-bows and composite bows. Self-bows dominated forested continents (Europe, the Americas, and Africa). Composite bows ruled in the drier regions (Middle East and Eurasia). Many intermediate forms probably emerged because of contact between different cultures.

Self-bows

The self-bow distinguishes itself by its durability and ease of construction, maintenance, and repair. It consists of a single (often straight) stave of wood. The most famous design is the longbow. As its name implies, the longbow is known for its length. It was about as tall as (or taller than) the archer who drew it. People often associate this bow type with the English longbow, which became an important battlefield weapon in the late middle ages. However, the longbow was used across Europe and other continents, while its design is much older. For example, Ötzi, the mummy found in the Italian Alps in 1991, carried a 182 cm longbow dating back to 3,300 BC. ¹²

Image: Longbow archers. Image by Peter Trimming. Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Archery_at_Appuldurcombe_(1)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1983840.jpg). CC BY SA 2.0.

The historical longbow differs from the so-called longbows still used at archery ranges in the Western world. The British Longbow Society, formed in 1951, restricts the term longbow to a Victorian and Edwardian ideal when archery had become a recreational activity. Ironically, their narrow criteria exclude all historical longbows – even the famous medieval English war bows. ¹⁰¹³ “Modern” longbows are usually laminated bows with a stiff center section, while (pre)historical longbows were self-bows bending with a continuous arc. Modern longbows have an arrow rest cut out in the middle part of the bow (either left or right), but with historical longbows, the arrow often rested on the archer’s bow hand.

The second type of self-bow is the flat bow. It is only slightly shorter than the longbow but has a different cross-section. The longbow either has a circular shape or a D-shape. The English longbow, for example, has a flat “back” and a rounded “belly” – the belly being the side of the bow that faces the archer. In contrast, a flatbow is flat on both sides. Compared to the longbow, which has narrow limbs and is usually the widest at the handle, the flatbow has wider limbs but a narrow handle. ¹⁴

Image: An ash flatbow, made by [Sagittaria Handcrafts](http://sagittaria-handcrafts.com/en/1-en-pokus/bows/detail_22/).

In the 1930s, American scientists set out to discover the optimal shape of a bow. To their surprise, they found that the D-shaped profile of the longbow – the only known historical western design at the time – is not the most efficient one. ¹⁴ Rather, a rectangular cross-section works best because it induces more uniform strain across the limb’s width. That makes the bow less prone to breakage.

The scientific discovery led to the design of the (recreational) American flatbow, which the scientists considered new. ¹⁵ In the 1940s, however, archeologists discovered the oldest prehistoric bow. It was a flatbow – the earlier mentioned Holmegaard. The Meare Heath bow, discovered in 1961 and dated to roughly 4,500 years ago, was also a flatbow. ¹⁶¹⁷ The American researchers also failed to notice that their innovation had been used for centuries by Native Americans. ¹⁴

Historically, the powerful draw of tall self-bows served for combat and hunting large animals. For hunting small game at close range, shorter hand bows (known as “small bows” or “birding bows”) were sufficient. These weapons were less powerful, used shorter and lighter arrows (often with blunt arrowheads), and were drawn to the breast instead of the ear. ¹³

Image: Historical bows from the African continent, showing the large size differences. Source: Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett. “A New Classification of the Bow and Arrow in Africa.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 56 (1926): 259-299.

Tension and compression

For a bow limb to store energy, the wood must have both strength (to withstand tension) and elasticity (to withstand compression). If a bow is overdrawn, two things can happen. If the wood is stronger in tension than in compression, as it is usually, the wood fibers in the belly of the bow will compress, and the bow will not fully return to its original form. The wood has exceeded its elastic limit, and the power of the bow is forever reduced. On the other hand, if the wood is stronger in compression than in tension, overdrawing the bow will result in a splintered back or a fracture. ¹⁸

Some wood species are especially well-suited to make bows. Historical bowyers considered yew to be one of the best materials. ¹³ Yew grows (slowly) across many parts of the world. Its sapwood (the white wood on the outside of the tree just below the bark) excels under tension. Its heartwood (the redwood that makes up the center) excels under compression. Therefore, in a yew bow, sapwood forms the back, and heartwood forms the belly. ¹⁹ Another excellent bow wood is osage orange, native to North America, but it can thrive in many climates. Only heartwood is used – osage orange has high bending strength and elasticity. ²⁰ Both wood species are also highly resistant to decay.

Image. A yew selfbow, showing hardwood and sapwood, made by master bowyer Jack Pinson, Under Warden, Ireland. Source: [Living Longbows](https://www.facebook.com/LivingLongbows).

Image: an osange orange flatbow, built by master bowyer Simon Sieß. It’s nearly impossible to find a straight stave of osage orange long enough for a bow, because the wood is full of twists, knots, and thorns. The bowyer works around these defects. Source: [Stonehill Primitive Bows](https://primitive-bows.com/category/bows/).

However, not all bows were made from yew or osage orange wood – far from that. Self-bows have been and can be made out of almost any type of wood, even wood that looks unlikely to make a bow. More important than the choice of wood is to match the design of the bow to the compression and tensile strength of a specific wood species. ²¹ A bow made of an inferior wood species can be protected from breaking or exceeding its elastic limit by adding more wood in the form of a longer or a wider bow. Bows made from excellent bow woods such as yew and osage orange have very narrow limbs, but bows made from weaker and less elastic woods can perform just as well with wider limbs. Less suitable bow wood also benefits from a rectangular cross-section (a flatbow design).

How to make a self bow

A self-bow can be made in a couple of hours – excluding the time to season the wood. It takes skill to make an excellent weapon, but building a crude self-bow is within everyone’s reach. Before metal tools were available, it was much easier to work wood that was still fresh and green. Therefore, seasoning wood took place after the bow was largely shaped. Once the wood had dried, the bow was finished with stone scrapers. The authors of the Bowyer’s Bible (a series of books that revived the interest in traditional archery during the 1990s) describe an experiment. They enter the forest with empty hands and come out with a bow that took them only six hours to make with stone-age tools: a rock, a self-made wood axe, and a fire. ¹⁴

Without metal tools, it took a lot of effort to cut down large trees to obtain bow wood. Some Native Americans invented an ingenious technique that involved prying bow staves from trunks and branches of living trees. ²²They cut two V-shaped notches at the upper and the lower end of the intended stave, which was then left in the tree for several years until it had seasoned. Finally, they wrenched the stave from the tree using a lever and shaped the bow. Some old trees still show the scars of this process. Bowyers could exploit the same tree for bow staves over many centuries.

Image: Prying bow staves from living trees. Source: Wilke, Philip J. \"[Bow staves harvested from Juniper trees by Indians of nevada](https://escholarship.org/content/qt4v5249w9/qt4v5249w9.pdf%C2%A0).\" Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 10.1 (1988): 3-31.

I could not find any references to bow stave trees in other regions, but coppicing and pollarding could also provide bow wood without cutting down entire trees. Yew trees were often pollarded. Another method was to plant them together in groups so they would grow straight up for perfect bow staves. When metal tools became available, harvesting bow wood and shaping a bow became easier. From then on, most bows were made from seasoned wood. However, the essential tools for a traditional bowyer have remained limited: a sharp hand axe, a wood rasp, and a scraper. ¹³¹⁴²³²⁴

Shaping a self-bow comes down to following the grain and character of the wood. If using logs, the first step is to split them into halves or quarters, using a wedge so that the crack follows the grain. Each piece of wood dictates the style and shape of a self-bow. For example, if there’s a twist in a part of the bow stave, the design will follow it, resulting in a partly twisted bow. The central part of the self-bow-making process is “tillering”: the bow limbs are made thinner and thinner by taking wood away from the belly side, little by little, and taking care not to take away too much. The back of the bow remains unchanged and follows the split-off growth ring of the stave. ¹³²⁵

Image: Freshly cut wood split into bow staves. Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bow_staves.JPG). Image by MartinFields (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Image: A self bow in the making by master bowyer Jack Pinson, Under Warden. Ireland. Source: [Living Longbows](https://www.facebook.com/LivingLongbows).

The composite bow

The composite bow is the opposite of the self-bow in almost any respect. Rather than taking material away, the composite bow consists of several layers of material glued together – usually wood, horn, and sinew (animal tendon or ligament). The bow is covered with bark or leather and sealed with lacquer. Rather than a long, straight stave, the composite bow is short (110 cm on average) and nearly always a recurve bow – a combination of reflex bow limbs (which bend away from the archer) and deflex bow limbs (which bend towards the archer). ⁷²⁶²⁷²⁸²⁹³⁰³¹³²

In a composite bow, the wood mainly serves as a framework for building up the other layers. Horn (which is excellent in withstanding compression) formed the belly of the bow, and sinew (which has very high tensile strength) formed the back of the bow. The horn usually came from the water buffalo, abundant in regions where the composite bow was adopted. The sinew came from the backs of deer, antelope, or cattle (thick pieces lying along both sides of the ridge bones of the spine) or from the Achilles heel of cattle.

Because the combination of these materials performs better than even the best bow woods, a composite bow can bend with a larger arc in proportion to its length than a self-bow. Consequently, it can be made shorter than an equally powerful self-bow. That made it perfect for horseback, as the archer can easily switch the bow from side to side. Most cultures who adapted the composite bow were horse archers, and the weapon is also known as a horse bow. The composite bow was also the weapon of choice for the chariot archer, who predates the horse archer.

Left: Tatar composite bow, showing the shape assumed in the unstrung and the strung state. Right: Persian composite bow, exhibiting extreme reflex curvature in the unstrung state. Source: Balfour, Henry. “The Archer’s Bow in the Homeric Poems.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 51 (1921): 289-309.

Image: Horse bow (strung and unstrung) made by master bowyer Bjørn Schmidt. Source: [Bjørn Schmidt](https://www.facebook.com/groups/161983523940600/user/100026327045649/).

Image: A collection of composite bows in various sizes. Source: Peter Dekker, [Mandarin Mansion](https://mandarinmansion.com).

It seems most likely that the composite bow developed in Central Asia and then spread into India, North Africa, Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Korea, and Japan. We do not know how old the composite bow is. The oldest archeological finds date to 3,000 BC, but the region has less ideal conditions for preservation than Europe, where archeologists found the oldest self-bows. Unlike the self bow, which is usually a straight stave and only varies in its cross-section, the composite bow appears in an extraordinary diversity of bow designs. ²⁶ Many composite bows had siyahs – non-bending levers at the end of the bow limbs that further increased the draw length and reduced the muscular power required to pull the bow.

How to make a composite bow

The composite bow is superior in performance to the self-bow. It can shoot arrows faster and farther with less effort. However, it takes more skill to use and requires a very elaborate manufacturing process. Making a composite bow takes 50 to 100 hours, spread over months or even years. ¹⁸²⁶ The more powerful the bow, the more time it takes to make it. The bowyer dips bundles of sinew in warm glue and lays them lengthwise across the bow. Each layer of sinew has to dry before the next one can be put on. The bowyer gradually pulls the bow to longer and longer draw lengths, a few centimeters at a time until the bow tips touch or cross. Once the bow is complete, it is cured over a low fire.

The composite bow is also less durable and requires more maintenance than the self-bow. Its susceptibility to humidity requires continuous care – a composite bow needs to be kept warm and dry. In cold weather, archers stuffed the bows inside clothes and took them to bed. If possible, they warmed the bow over a fire before shooting. The Chinese (who built the largest composite bows) used dedicated warming cabinets to maintain or restore the recurve form lost during use. Composite bows also had to be protected from animals eating the sinew parts. Worms may eat the horn. ⁷²⁶²⁷²⁸²⁹³⁰³¹³²³³

Image: making a composite bow. Source unknown. Via [Mihkel Tammet](https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=294008220709631&set=g.161983523940600).

Image: A composite bow in the making. Source: [The modern reproduction of a Mongol era bow based on historical facts and ancient technology research](https://exarc.net/issue-2017-2/at/modern-reproduction-mongol-era-bow-based-historical-facts-and-ancient-technology-research). Jason Wayne Beever & Zoran Pavlović, EXARC Journal Issue 2017/02.

Backing: fusing the self and composite bow

To a certain extent, the advantages of the composite bow can be transferred to the self bow. Making a bow longer or wider is not the only way to make a powerful weapon from inferior wood. The other method is reinforcing or “backing” a bow. ³⁴³⁵ That involves gluing a material with high tensile strength on the back – the side of the bow facing away from the archer. The backing material can be sinew like in the composite bow. However, other materials work as well, or even better: rawhide, gut, skin, silk, and many vegetable fibers such as flax, hemp, or jute. Some reinforced bows were built of sinew-backed antler.

Backing allowed designs that were impossible to make in wood alone, such as short but powerful bows. Reinforced self-bows were common to indigenous peoples of North America ³⁶³⁷ When the Spanish introduced horses on the continent, Native Americans were quick to note the advantages of shooting from horseback, and adapted their bows by making them shorter – 90 to 110 cm. Being a simplified form of the Asiatic three layer construction, sinew-backed bows share some of the disadvantages. Backing increases the production time of a self bow to between eight and twenty hours, spread out over a period of two weeks to a month, and a reinforced bow needs protection against humidity.

In addition, adding a backing was a common way to repair a self-bow. If a bow developed a splinter on the back, gluing on rawhide, flax, or sinew could fix the problem. ³⁵ If a bow had taken too much set – if it had exceeded its elastic limit – another technique could be used. The bowyer turned the bow around, letting the back become the belly, and applied backing to the new back (which used to be the belly).

Image: A wide limbed bow with sinew backing. Source: [National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian](https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/search?page=26&edan_q=BOW).

Image: [juniper west coast style bow](https://primitive-bows.com/juniper-west-coast-style-bow-hld-no-7/), built by master bowyer Simon Sieß. Only the nocks are strengthened with sinew. Source: [Stonehill Primitive Bows](https://primitive-bows.com/category/bows/).

Image: sinew preparation. Source: [Making the sinew-backed bow](https://primitivelifeways.com/2019/05/making-the-sinew-backed-bow/), Jeff Martin, Primitive Lifeways.

Image: sinew backing. Source: [Making the sinew-backed bow](https://primitivelifeways.com/2019/05/making-the-sinew-backed-bow/), Jeff Martin, Primitive Lifeways.

Cable-backed bows

The prize for the most inventive bow-making method goes to the Inuit, who faced two problems. First, they had a limited choice of bow wood. This was either driftwood, or spruce and fir, very brittle woods that lack elasticity. ¹⁴³⁸ Second, animal glue is difficult to use in cold air, jelling almost instantly. The Inuit solved this by making bows from materials such as sheep horn, caribou antler, and baleen, which they reinforced by “cable backing”. This was the use of elevated sinew cables that ran up and down the limbs, fixed by an elaborate system of knots.

The backing consisted of a continuous stout twine made of sinew up to 45 meters long. The bowyer wrapped it around one of the bow nocks, ran it down the back of the bow, then wrapped it around the other bow nock, ran it up the back again, and so on, until several dozens of strands were on the bow. Next, the strands were twisted and fixed to the bow with knots in sometimes very complex patterns. Little flat rods served for twisting the cords. They were used in pairs, holding one in each hand to secure the same amount of twist in the two. ¹⁴³⁸

Any backing must be proportional to limb mass across the bow, meaning it has to be thicker at the grip and thinner towards the bow tips. With a glued-on backing, this is easy to achieve: add more backing layers in the middle of the bow. However, it’s hard to reduce the diameter of a cable from grip to tip. The Inuit solved this by running part of the cables for just a portion of the limb length. Up to a dozen threads only extended across the middle of the bow. Most cable-backed self-bows were short flatbows – at most 125 cm long. ¹⁴³⁸

Image: Cable-backed bows. Source: Murdoch, John. \"A study of the Eskimo bows in the US National Museum.\" Report of the United States National Museum for the year 1884.

Cord bindings

Yet another method for making a bow out of inferior wood was the use of cord bindings. Rather than gluing a backing on the back of the bow, or stretching cables from one end to the other, cord bindings consisted of backing material that was wrapped around the bow.

A famous example of this technique is the Meare Heath bow. Found in 1961 in the peat bogs of Somerset, England, it dates back to about 2,690 BC. This flatbow – 6 cm wide and 190 cm long – had both transverse and criss-cross leather and sinew bindings. A replica of the bow – made with stone age tools – showed that it was an excellent weapon, surpassing the performance of the English longbow that appeared a few thousand years later. ¹⁷ Cord bindings continued to be used in the middle ages, also on some composite bows. ¹³ For example, the Hunza in Afghanistan wrap their entire bows with sinew. ¹⁰

Finally, there’s the Japanese bow, the yumi, which is a category of its own. The yumi is a laminated bow – made from at least seven layers of bamboo and wood – but its construction and design is clearly influenced by the composite bow. The yumi distinguishes itself by its length (it can surpass two metres) and its assymetry – the upper limb is two-thirds the overall length. The longer limb allows a longer draw while the shorter limb allows to shoot the bow from horseback or while kneeling. Making a yumi required the bowyer to use his hand and feet, working quickly with fast-drying glues that could be softened again in a steam tent. ¹⁰

Image: drawing of the Meare Heath bow. Source: Clark, J. G. D. \"Neolithic bows from Somerset, England, and the prehistory of archery in north-western Europe.\" Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. Vol. 29. Cambridge University Press, 1963.

Image: A replica of the Meare Heath bow, made by master bowyer Greg Anderson. Source: [North Wood Traditional Archery](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100067570410615).

Image: The Penobscot bow. Yet another method to build a bow from inferior wood. The bow’s draw weight is increased by adding a second limb. Source: [National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian](https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/objects/NMAI_27561).

Growing arrows

By itself, the bow is not a useful weapon. It requires ammunition in the form of arrows. Finding wood for arrows was much easier than obtaining wood for bows. ¹³³⁹⁴⁰ Most wood species make good arrows, and the wood can be shorter. Arrows were usually less than a metre long, except in the tropics, where they could be much longer. ⁴¹ Before the arrival of metal tools, arrow shafts were made from either shoots and saplings or cane, bamboo, and reeds – depending on what was available locally. These materials already have the shape of arrow shafts and grow in different lengths and diameters. ⁴¹

Shoots and saplings were debarked, straightened over a fire, finished, and then seasoned for a few weeks or months. These arrow shafts were solid and relatively heavy, which increased mass and penetration. Canes, bamboo, and reeds did not require debarking and were waterproof without further treatment. On the other hand, they were hollow and much lighter than shafts made from shoots and saplings. A separate foreshaft made from wood or bone was inserted into the hollow shaft to give them sufficient strength and mass. The nock was reinforced to prevent the bowstring from splitting the arrowshaft. ³⁹⁴⁰

Metal cutting tools gave birth to a new method, which allowed arrow shafts made from sawn timber. Wooden boards are cut into small squares the size of arrow shafts and then have their four corners shaven off, making them octagonal. These shafts are then rounded with sandpaper or sandstone. “Split timber shafting” reduced the time to make arrow shafts, made it possible to produce arrows in large numbers, and improved their ballistic capabilities. ³⁹⁴⁰⁴²

Image: A set of arrows with wooden points and blunts. Source: [National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian](https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/objects/NMAI_31682?destination=edan_searchtab%3Fpage%3D5%26edan_q%3DARROWS)

Image: Replicas of prehistoric arrows, made by master bowyer Greg Anderson. Source: [North Wood Traditional Archery](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100067570410615).

Image: Replicas of medieval arrows, made by Heritage Longbows. Source: [Heritage Longbows](https://www.heritagelongbows.com).

Arrows and bows from Africa. Source: Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett. “A New Classification of the Bow and Arrow in Africa.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 56 (1926): 259-299.

The shaft is the structural element of the arrow to which the arrowhead, the fletching, and the nock are attached. Historically, the nock was often cut into the shaft, sometimes reinforced with bone, horn, or hardwood. The fletching usually consisted of three feathers, which could come from many birds (such as goose and turkey). They were glued to the shaft and bound with sinew thread. ¹³

Arrowheads were made from many materials, including stone, bone, antler, teeth, and metal (bronze, wrought iron, steel). Metal arrowheads appeared most recently but did not perform better than arrowheads made from primitive materials. However, they were faster and more economical to manufacture. Wooden points remained in use through history alongside more durable but labour-intensive materials. ⁴³ The shape of an arrowhead varied along with its use – hundreds of different types have existed. Arrowheads were fixed to the shaft with glue and a sinew binding, or inserted into a hollow shaft.

Reuse and repair of arrows

Making a set of arrows took considerably more time than making the average self-bow. However, archers routinely reused their projectiles. You can’t shoot a bullet, then put it back in a firearm and fire it a second time. However, you can launch the same arrow over and over again. That is evident in practice shooting, but it happened just as well during the hunt and on the battlefield. Arrows could change sides several times in a battle. They were picked up from the ground or extracted from dead enemies or comrades. ¹⁰²⁹⁴⁴

Because they were valuable, even impaired arrows were routinely collected for repair. Limited repairs happened on the battlefield or during the hunt, and some fletchers could be attached to armies, extending the ammunition supply. If an arrow shaft broke close to the arrowhead – a common point of failure – attaching a new arrowhead was a quick fix to make a new, slightly shorter arrow. Even if the projectile became undersized for one archer, it could still serve a somewhat smaller archer. The Hazda, a tribe in Africa, used arrows that were longer than necessary and were cut shorter several times after breakage. ²

If the shaft broke in another place, it could be repaired by a more elaborate process called “footing.” This technique, which required metal tools, involved splicing with fishtail joints. Finally, arrowheads and feathers could be reused to make new arrows.

Image: Tools of the arrow maker. Source: Mason, Otis T. North American bows, arrows, and quivers. JM Carroll, 1893.

Growing bowstrings

The combination of a bow and a set of arrows is still not a weapon. The missing part is the bowstring, which brings the two together. Like bows and arrows, you can make strings from many different materials, and a suitable source of fiber is never far away. Historically, most bow strings were either made from vegetable fibers (hemp, flax, milkweed, ramie, nettle) or animal fibers (silk, sinew, rawhide, gut). Even human hair makes bow strings. Bowyers can grow their bow string material by planting some hemp or flax, which also provides material for backing bows and for making linseed oil – a traditional bow and arrow finish. ⁴⁵

The Bowyer’s Bible dedicates a long chapter to making completely serviceable strings in the field even under the most primitive conditions: “Pull a fiber-bearing plant from the ground, pull a twig from a tree – for use as a spindle – and with this caveman’s gear, a thread can be spun finer and stronger than the finest machine-spun equivalent. With a little bit of practice, using a drop spindle, it takes about one and a half hours to spin a bowstring’s worth of thread. Using a spinning wheel, it can be done in twenty minutes. When spinning is complete, you are about fifteen minutes away from a flawless, first-class bowstring.” ⁴⁵

Turning a thread into a bow string can be done in different ways. The “endless string” is the easiest to make. You drive two nails into a wooden board, and the distance between them equals the desired string length (a bit shorter than the bow itself). The string is winded back and forth around the nails until you reach the desired strand number – usually 12 to 16 strands. The two loose ends are then tied together, reinforced with a separate thread, and made into loops that can be attached to the bow nocks. In some regions, archers used knots rather than loops to attach the string to the bow, which allowed them to adjust the length of the bowstring. ⁴⁵

Image: Bow strings made by master bowyer Greg Anderson. Source: [North Wood Traditional Archery](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100067570410615).

Image: A bowstring made by master bowyer Jack Pinson, Under Warden. Ireland. Source: [Living Longbows](https://www.facebook.com/LivingLongbows).

Do weapons need to be sustainable?

Historic and prehistoric bows and arrows were entirely made from natural and locally available materials. These came from plants and trees (wood, cane, bamboo, flax), animals (tendon, bone, feathers, glue), and minerals (stone and metal points). Nowadays, just like 10,000 years ago, one can walk into a forest or any other natural environment with empty hands and come out with a functional weapon. Even the tools to make it are in nature. The manufacturing is entirely human-powered, only aided here and there by a fire. Ammunition can be reused, repaired, and recycled.

That raises some questions. First, should weapons be sustainable? The use of bows and arrows was a perfect example of what we nowadays call the “circular economy.” In contrast, the manufacturing of modern firearms depends on a highly complex, globally interconnected, and interdependent supply chain, which consists of mines, factories, transport and power systems, fossil fuels, and parts of the economy such as finance and communication technology. Few of the materials required to make modern firearms are available locally or naturally, and the production creates waste and emissions. The same holds for modern bows and arrows made of metals, plastics, and synthetic composites.

Second, if it’s relatively easy to make lethal weapons, especially self-bows, why are we not plagued by waves of bow violence analogous to gun violence? There’s a lot of unease about 3D-printed firearms and “ghost guns” (unregistered firearms built up from anonymous gun parts), but how is that different from entering a forest with bare hands and coming out with a weapon that could kill an elephant? These days the choice of local materials has only grown. Any modern material that bends and returns can become a bow. You can make arrowheads from window or bottle glass, electronic modules, or old saw blades. ¹⁸ No firearm user can achieve the self-sufficiency of the preindustrial archer.

Third, if modern firearms depend on fossil fuels and a global supply chain, what if this context disappears? Could low-tech, artisanally made firearms compete with longbows, flatbows, and composite bows? In the following article, I try to answer these questions, and make a proposal: “What if we replace guns and bullets with bows and arrows?”.

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Cattelain, Pierre. “Hunting during the Upper Paleolithic: bow, spearthrower, or both?.” Projectile technology. Springer, Boston, MA, 1997. 213-240. ↩︎ ↩︎
Meadows, John, et al. “Dating the lost arrow shafts from Stellmoor (Schleswig-Holstein, Germany).” (2018): 105-114. https://quartaer.obermaier-gesellschaft.de/pdfs/2018/2018_05_meadows.pdf ↩︎
Lombard, Marlize, and John J. Shea. “Did Pleistocene Africans use the spearthrower‐and‐dart?.” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 30.5 (2021): 307-315. ↩︎ ↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower ↩︎
Grund, Brigid Sky. “Behavioral ecology, technology, and the organization of labor: How a shift from spear thrower to self bow exacerbates social disparities.” American Anthropologist 119.1 (2017): 104-119. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1111/aman.12820 ↩︎
Randall, Karl Chandler. Origins and Comparative Performance of the Composite Bow. Diss. University of South Africa, 2016. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/79170491.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Denny, Mark. Their arrows will darken the sun: the evolution and science of ballistics. JHU Press, 2011. ↩︎
See the second part of this article: “What if we replace guns and bullets by bows and arrows?”. ↩︎ ↩︎
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Hamm, Jim. “The Traditional Bowyer’s Bible, Volume Three.” 1994. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Clay Hayes, Traditional Bowyer’s Handbook: How to Build Wooden Bows and Arrows. ↩︎
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Loades, Mike. The Composite Bow. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Balfour, Henry. “On the structure and affinities of the composite bow.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 19 (1890): 220-250. ↩︎ ↩︎
Nieminen, Timo A. “The Asian war bow.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.1677 (2011). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Hurley, Vic. Arrows against steel: the history of the bow and how it forever changed warfare. Cerberus Books, 2011. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Grayson, Bert. “Composite bows.” The Traditional Bowyers Bible, Volume Two (1993): 113-154. ↩︎ ↩︎
Schmidt, Jeff. “Korean archery”. The Traditional Bowyer’s Bible, Volume Three. 1994: 99-114. ↩︎ ↩︎
https://www.mandarinmansion.com/article/qing-bow-glossary ↩︎ ↩︎
http://www.manchuarchery.org/content/composite-bow-care-and-maintenance ↩︎
Hamm, Jim. “Sinew-backing”. The traditional bowyer’s bible (1992): 213-232. See also: Comstock, Paul. “Other backings”. The traditional bowyer’s bible (1992): 233-257. ↩︎
Bergman, Christopher A., and Edward McEwen. “Sinew-reinforced and composite bows.” Projectile Technology. Springer, Boston, MA, 1997. 143-160. ↩︎ ↩︎
Allely, Steve. “Eastern Indian Bows”. The traditional bowyer’s bible volume one (1992): 165-194. Herrin, Al. “Eastern Woodland Bows”. The traditional bowyer’s bible volume two (1993): 51-80. Hamm, Jim. “Plains Indian Bows”. The traditional bowyer’s bible volume 3 (1994): 115-142. ↩︎
Edinborough, Kevan Stephen Anthony. Evolution of bow-arrow technology. University of London, University College London (United Kingdom), 2005. ↩︎
Murdoch, John. “A study of the Eskimo bows in the US National Museum.” Report of the United States National Museum for the year 1884 (Pt. 2 of the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smitshonian Institution for the year 1884) (1884). https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/29824/1884_Murdoch_307-316.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Massey, Jay. “Self arrows”. The traditional bowyer’s bible, volume one (1992): 299-320. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Lotz, Mickey. “Arrows of the world”. The traditional bowyer’s bible, volume four (2008): 213-254. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Longbow arrows usually weighed around 70-90 grammes, while composite bow arrows were between 20 and 40 g. Large composite bows, such as the Manchu bow, shot 100 g arrows. ²⁸ Arrows measured between 45 and 150 cm, depending on the culture and the materials available. For example., South Americans used long arrows in the jungle, to find their arrows back and to not deflect the arrow in the undergrowth. ¹⁴ ↩︎ ↩︎
Sadło, Maciej. “Experimental Studies in the Field of Ballistics on Different Types of Arrow Shafts.” Chronika, Volume XI (2021): 76. http://www.chronikajournal.com/resources/Chronika%20volume%2011.pdf#page=82 ↩︎
Waguespack, Nicole M., et al. “Making a point: wood-versus stone-tipped projectiles.” Antiquity 83.321 (2009): 786-800. ↩︎
Dougherty, Martin J. The Medieval Warrior: Weapons, Technology and Fighting Techniques: AD 1000-1500. Lyons Press, 2011. ↩︎
Baker, Tim. “Strings”, The traditional bowyer’s bible volume two (1993): 187-259. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎