I am interested in what historical accounts, or heuristic based data, indicates about Celtic through Migration era projectile weapon usage. Some Roman-Gaul accounts indicated as many as 3 volleys of projectiles being used against the Roman lines at the start of battle. The descriptions I have seen did not give details, but terms such as; "rocks", "clubs", "javelins", "darts", and "axes" seem to be common interpretations of weapons mentioned in those accounts.

I did not research this well, but a rough guess of credible ranges might be something like below;

Throwing Axe/ Francisca, ,or club like implement that was thrown - 4 to 9 meters practical range (Modern sport opinion based on range where utility and damage for manageable weight weapons are considered to be meaningful.)

"Historical Dart" - ? No idea what these compare to. Input welcome.

Javelin, historically similar in weight and proportion to Women's Olympic weight and length - 40 to 70 meters, range of competitive U.S. women's college distances to Olympic record distance. (Yes, thrown by modern WOMEN ATHLETES specializing in this. Don't underestimate their training, developed strength, or capabilities. That was the data I could find for an appropriate sized and weight javelin of roughly 2 meter length and believable weight.) A recent video of an accident at the Golden League Rome event shows that modern javelins are serious at competition throw range. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhT30Ov41_s The wounds caused by Tero Pitkamaki's throw to Salim Sdira were more serious than initially reported. It punched through his back into his kidney. It took him a year to recover from before returning to competition.

Bow, "European Pre- Longbow", -150 to 200 meters (just a guess on possible heavy bows, although arrows don't seem to have prominent mention in accounts of battles in my period of interest.

Stone "bullet" from sling - approximately 200 meters range, (Up to 400 meters is considered a feasible flight distance, but I can't even see that far, and suspect that it would just be a falling rock at that kind of range.)

Given these or other peoples ideas of ranges, would an opening battle projectile sequence such as; long range slings, javelins while closing distances between lines, darts, and then clubs and axes thrown on the run just before opposing lines met make the most sense?

I think you are forgetting the pilum / angon type weapons, which, as I understand it, have a flat trajectory.

Maybe Francisca range?

Well, the pilum is just another sort of javelin. While it *can* be thrown with a relatively flat trajectory at very close range, for any distance you have to throw in a high arc.

http://www.larp.com/legioxx/pila02.MPG

The angon would be pretty much the same.

While I'm sure that any trained ancient warrior would be able to throw farther than the average reenactor, Olympic distances may be too much. The circumstances are simply much better than in the typical battle situation.

And I have a bad feeling that many of your answers will be, "It varies!"

Valete,

Matthew

On the subject of high trajectory shooting, I have heard (I dont know if its true or not) that the battle of Hastings was the first major battle in which this tactic was used. Probably not very helpful, I know, but I just thought I'd throw it out there.

Not sure or convinced about how much training it takes to " shoot/loose " an arrow at a high angle but I can imagine that a single archer would find it of little use since the odds of hitting anything at very long distances would be poor unless practised a great deal to even have a chance of hitting a large target. ( Maybe 12 feet across at between 200 and 300 yards ).

If one can keep ones arrows consistently within 12 feet at these distances the arrows of a single archer would have some limited suppressive fire application or at least making an enemy " nervous ". ;) :lol:

Now if we are talking of 50, 500 or 5000 archers all shooting at high angles it just becomes statistically effective on a distant large group of enemies. ;) :?:

An untrained in long range high angle shooting 5000 versus an army of 5000 archers who where trained to use this plunging fire should make the trained archers much more efficient as most of the arrows would be in the targeted beaten zone rather than having a much wider and less efficient dispersion of arrows.

A long post to just say that even untrained a lot of archers could shoot at a high angle but the results would be less lethal than for trained archers but still something they could do but might just not think of doing if there are all trained to aim carefully at specific targets, and hesitant to waste a limited supply or arrows on what each of them would consider to be wasted arrows with a low probability of hitting. ( I assume here that unless it's a known tactic the archers would not have the large logistic supplies of arrows available for an extended in time arrow storm to make the tactic a good one ).

For military archery, one can find writers giving very little importance to distance shooting (e.g., a Japanese writer quoted in G. C. Hurst III, Armed Martial Arts of Japan, "For shooting an enemy on the battlefield, one needs, moreover, to practice shooting at a distance of seven or eight ken [approximately 15m] to be able to penetrate his armor.", Musashi noting that the bow can be useful if the enemy is within 40 yards). Further, one can find cases where bows optimised for long-distance shooting are displaced in military usage by bows optimised for short-range shooting. To be able to use long range archery with useful military effect is such that shooting at long range has, at times, not been considered useful on the battlefield, even when it was clearly known that arrows could be shot to such distances.

To be able to hit a target at long range is a far different thing from being able to hit a target at 15m. It's also a far different thing from being able to shoot an arrow to long range. When military archery was practiced and commented on in writing in civilised societies, there were thousands of military archers, who practiced. It would be a great secret of archery for none of them to discover it. I see children, with no experience of plunging artillery fire or such military things, when given bows, playing and exploring just how far they can shoot arrows - even when it is explicitly forbidden to do so. One recored use of "military" archery in primitive warfare is to shoot arrows to the maximum range of 90m or so at an enemy shouting and chest-beating 100m away.

No, I don't think that ancient archers had not discovered what children readily do - that arrows shot at higher angles go further (just like rocks and spears thrown at higher angles). I don't think this is a realistic explanation of bow range vs sling range descriptions. Far more plausible, IMHO, that it's either about effective military range, or about good slings vs bad bows.

(I find that a short sling, vertical plane shooting, with poor ammunition, gets over 90m easily, with brief and casual training. A sling needs to know about trajectories to get near the target. If the archers watch slingers at practice, they'll learn any "secrets" about trajectories they haven't discovered yet.)

Hey, I'm not disputing the idea that ancient archers could (and did) try to shoot arrows over high trajectories without the benefit of any prior art. Neither am I denying that the lack of range attributed to ancient bow might have been due--in many cases--to the bow being either poorly designed or paired with the wrong kind of arrow for long-range shooting. What I'm pointing out is that they wouldn't necessarily see the need for (or the point of) developing this kind of high-angle shooting for fun into a useful military practice--and this, too, cannot be ruled out as one of the reasons for the relatively short range attributed to bows in ancient Greek sources. In such situations, yes, high-trajectory shooting was not a secret, but it wasn't seen as being sufficiently practical either to be worth the bother of further development for a military purpose. After all, not all ancient bows were necessarily that bad. If I'm not mistaken, Bob Kooi's mathematical modeling revealed a large variation in strength and efficiency among the Iron Age bows discovered so far in the general area of northwestern Europe, and the few best specimens weren't that much worse off than their medieval counterparts. The only thing we lack right now is actual physical reconstruction and shooting experiments to see just how good (or bad) these bows were.

And, lest we forget the main thrust of the argument, let me reiterate that my original post said

Quote:

This is one probable reason for some ancient authors' statements that the sling could send a stone farther than a bow could loose an arrow

Just one probable reason, and that means "one probable reason among others." Not the reason, which implies the only probable reason. So please don't argue with me as if I'm proposing this theory as the only explanation for the shorter range of bows vis-a-vis slings in some (not all!) ancient authors' accounts.

I have assumed some devices such as javelins would be used in high angle trajectories. (This is pretty much how modern athletes use them.) I have not seen anyone use the atlatl, but expect it would be flatter. I have more interest in the Western European and Germanic tribes of migration era. There is very little use of the bow attributed to them that I know of, but Persian counterparts do seem to have a recurve - longbow in the same period.

As a reply to both of the previous posts:

The Hebedy bow has also been done - reproduced (in a variety of draw weights) and shot. I don't have a source at hand, but I suspect there's something in Traditional Bowyer's Bible. There is stuff scattered on www, especially on traditional archery forums. Essentially, poor range. Maximum ranges of 140-180m, IIRC, depending on draw weight, with the top end from 100+# bows (which is about the estimated draw weight of the find, 105#). Overall, similar in many ways to Holmegaard. It's heavy-limbed, and thus slow.

It's the usual wooden self-bow problem. Wood is not the best material for a bow. For a long draw, the bow needs to be long, and generally ends up heavy-limbed. Even the longer ones often have relatively short draw lengths, which limits the energy. Sure, you can lighten the limbs by making them shorter, but then you get hit in draw length, and probably draw weight too.

So, the maximum range of these bows is often 100-150m. You shouldn't see much below 100m, even for a slow heavy-limbed longbow. Looks like the heavier end - which will tend to be purpose-built warbows - will maybe do up to 200m. IMHO, this extra range is more of a side-effect of increasing the energy at short range, rather than wanted long range as the main goal. Extra energy = better armour penetration. Expect war arrows used with such bows to be heavy! English longbow arrows seem to have been 80-90g.

This doesn't translate into a very long effective military range. The weapon is at its best at short-range direct fire. 15m is great - very flat trajectory, especially for the high draw weight bows, and very little energy is lost due to drag. I'd say that you want the target to be within 30-40m. This is all in accord with Japanese military archery, which made use of a similarly sluggish longbow (of laminated wood/bamboo construction, mildly recurved-reflexed, but very long and heavy limbed).

An arrow will go further than that, but it becomes more and more of a lottery ticket, rather than a likely-to-be-effective shot. Better to use arrows when they can be effective, rather than shoot them in the general direction of the enemy, with the main effect being to increase the enemy's arrow supply.

Such longbows were in use in Europe for a long time, from the Neolithic through to approx AD1000. So, plausible Migration Period bows. Made from local materials, affordable, useful for hunting, useful in war, lacking in range.

What other alternatives were there? There was the Central Asian composite bow. Shorter, much lighter limbed, and a much faster bow. Therefore, longer ranged. Military practice ranges could be over 150m - Vegetius gives 166m, East Asian archers shot at targets at 150-170m, Ottoman at about 170m. Used militarily from something BC to modern rifles (they co-existed with older handguns for a long time).

There are two key differences. This bow is expensive. It's slow to make, requires skilled specialist makers. it's hard to maintain. (The cost difference was a key element in the Muscovite switch to handguns; the Qing kept the bow alongside the musket - but a Qing/Manchu bow cost more than 2 muskets, and was a friendlier design to make than the range/speed optimised composite bow.) Humidity destroys it - a significant problem as one moves into Western Europe. (This limited the spread of the composite bow into India and SE Asia too.)

Secondly, you need well-trained archers to be able to hit targets at 166m. This is really a weapon for a professional standing army rather than a part-time militia.

It's also at its best with light arrows. For Ottoman bows, a "heavy" arrow was 40g or so, a flight arrow 20g.

The Migration Period migrations came from areas where the composite bow was used. So, it's also a plausible Migration Period bow. The Scythians used it, the Avars used it, the Huns used it, the Romans used it. Depending on who is included in "Migration Period peoples", it is definitely a migration period bow. I don't know the geographical extent of its use into Europe.

A long-range sling, with a good slinger, will put lead shot to 200m. Rhodian slingers used lead shot, Persians used stones, so Xenophon is plausible (as he should be), even if his Persian archers used the composite bow (at least some Persian archers of this time appear to have, but there was room for variety in a Persian army). In my experience, this kind of range needs a long sling, so the slingers need to swing horizontally, so they need more room, and a lot more practice to hit targets. In comparison, the short-sling vertical plane style, with the Vegetius-recommended single swing, has less range, but is much less demanding on skill. Takes less space, too. For this latter style, I'd recommend 40-80m with stones as the best military range. A bow gains tremendously in accuracy as the range is shortened, and a sling does not. So less benefit for the risk of short range shooting. I find I must look at my sling when reloading, so I lose sight of the target. This could be most unpleasant when the target is running at you. A sling is also less defensively useful to have in hand when they do close with you. Thus, my recommendation of 40+m. The former style, with lead shot, and long slings, will be useful at longer range, but is a specialist weapon.

With the Central Asian composite bow, the best military archers can apparently hit targets at 300m or so, but this is a remarkable level of skill. Flight shots will go past 400m (and so will extreme sling shots), but this isn't as useful in battle.

Timo very interesting post and I learned a great deal from it.

Lafayette, also good additional information.

One thing I get from this is that even if one can give theoretical statistics about range of various weapons the effective tactical use often makes the possible long range shooting less than optimum tactically and logistically so that even if it might at times be useful to shoot very long range volleys it was depending on the situation better to save ones arrows for close range and more effective use and in the case of the sling the useful range is more medium to long range with close range being dangerous as the enemy can close in faster than one can aim and shoot.

In any case, the tactical subtleties are something to think about. ;) :D :cool: