Tribal India ?

[colin henshaw]

Originally Posted by Timo Nieminen

I haven't seen an Afican bow with nocks/tips like that.

The axe looks Indian. Khond? So, the obvious next step is to look at Khond bows. Here is one in the British Museum: http://www.britishmuseum.org/researc...71416&partId=1 (photo attached) with a rattan string very similar to yours. The nocks/tip aren't a closer match than the African bows, though. (The African bows in Six Continents might have rattan strings too, rather than bamboo (the text says bamboo).)

The African thing about the arrows is the heads: Z-cross section blades, a mix of double and single barbs, and a needle point. (Is the needle point iron or something else? African needle point heads are often hardwood and grooved (for poison).) I don't know enough about tribal Indian archery to say whether or not they're plausibly Indian or not.

Thanks for your post. The arrowheads are all of iron.

I did some internet searching and found these images of Khond archery. It seems all my items could be Khond ? Wonder what the hole in the axehead is for ... the attachment of adornments or just for fixing to a wall ?

[Tim Simmons]

Colin I think you are right about somewhere on the Indian subcontinent. There are or were many forrest peoples in both Ceylon and in India besides those known as the Kond. The axe is Kondish, when I get my PC to recognise my scanner I have a picture of Indian forest people called "Kols" to post. It is not terribly detailed but you can see the flat bows, something not African in general.