So in between more ongoing projects than I can count* I've been picking at the horse archer cultures. The bug got started reading Herodutus' accounts of the Scythians**, and since then I've been supplementing it with some online reading and the occasional podcast.
Which has me wondering about the Jared Diamond thing again. Some of the things I heard described as things the steppe archers did was exactly like stories I heard living out west about the plains Indians - this technique with the bow, that riding exercise.... Surely there were differences, but the commonalities were fairly striking.
It makes me wonder.. how much of that culture is unique and self-perpetuating - and how much really is as Dimond would say, a product of their physical environment? I suppose it's the same nature vs nurture argument on a larger scale.
wuh. Enough philosophizing. Time to go make people happy. :)
*I swear, I get to stay in one night this week.. it's all good stuff, but tiring!
** Say what you will about the more medieval strains of Islam now, it's telling that it actually improved things there from the sound of it. I mean... skull drinking cups and human leather napkins? Gah! Like a whole freaking country of Manson followers. *shudder*
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I suspect the techniques involving archery developed independently but along similar lines, simply because of physics/ballastics/etc - arrows will only do certain things, or fly so far.
Sounds like you're doing some interesting reading, though.
True.. more it strikes me that "people on open plain" + "availability of horses" seems to = "incredibly practiced horsearchers with a predominantly meat diet."
Granted the steppefolk were more herdsmen to the hunters of our plains.. but in just the couple hundred years between the reintroduction of horses they'd already started making horn and sinew bows, albeit not as refined as those of the Mongols.
So.. if they'd been up against housecarls with axes instead of settlers with Hawkens and Winchesters, might the Lakota have eventually become closer to their eastern brethren, eventually domesticating some form of buffalo and living a more "steppe" life?
They their ancestors best we know killed off the first round of horses would seem to imply not... but there was a lot of water under the bridge between those periods.
Guess we'll never know. Sure is neat to think about though. Crazy Khan Crow. :)
And yes... it has been interesting. Amazing how familiar our ancestors seem sometimes.
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