Sources of supply of composite bows to the Buryats

Abstract

The article discusses the main sources of supply of composite bows to the Buryats. In the works of domestic researchers, starting from the 18th century, individual theses appear on the local and imported nature of objects, their characteristics and differences are mentioned, and the manufacturing process is described, but these data have not been generalized to date. The subject of the study is a complex of written, material and pictorial sources containing information about the place and time of manufacture of composite bows used by Buryat archers. The article analyzes data from written sources and published works of specialists on the topic. The data is compared with identified composite bows from museum and private collections collected in the territory of Buryat residence or received from Buryat archers, as well as with a series of published images. As a result of the analysis, it was possible to identify and prove the existence of two sources of supply of composite bows to Buryat archers: imports and local production. Imported products are represented by various variants of the “Manchu-Mongolian” tradition, differing in the general ideas of the craftsmen about morphology, sizes and basic manufacturing techniques; Bright decor was used for decoration. The most common were locally made compound bows. Despite some differences, locally produced items are fundamentally different from imported ones in terms of morphometric features, which confirms that the Buryats have a local, distinctive culture of shooting and making composite bows.