Experimental Archeology: Shooting an 8th to 3 century BC Skythian/Tagar style bronze thimble replica.

Experimental Archeology: Shooting an 8th to 3 century BC Skythian/Tagar style bronze thimble replica.

Sometimes archeology dishes us up with curious archery artefacts, like the Tagar culture archery thumb thimbles. 

Unfortunately presently I cannot put a more exact date to these findings. Such thimbles were found along the Yenisey river in the Minusinskaya kotlovina basin ,republic of Khakasia. Southern Siberia, and belong to the Tagar culture.  Tagar culture dates from 8th to 3rd century BC. The Minusinsk Depression is right around the corner of the Altai mountains, in which the 5^th century BC Ukok ice princess was found, and where the Skythian Pazyryk culture flourished. The Tagars have been described by archaeologists as exhibiting pronounced Europoid features. They are believed to have belonged to the Scythian circle. The Tagar produced animal art motifs (Scythian art) very similar to the Scythians of southern European Russia. Perhaps the most striking feature of the culture are huge royal kurgans fenced by stone plaques, with four vertical stelae marking the corners.

So.. were Tagars Skythians? I am not an expert. Well at least materialwise  and culturewise they were very similar and closely related to their Pazyryk neighbours. 

If you look at the historial era and geographical area of these curious archery thimbles, my initial thought was that these curious bronze thimbles might be an intermediate between the old Chinese cylindrical thumb rings and the modern long lipped shaped thumb rings. If you attach the thible to a cylindrical thumb ring.. You get a (more) modern one. Long lipped thumb rings emerged for the first time outside China in Persia at the times of Alexander the Great.  Unfortunately history proves me wrong and that is not the case. The thumb ring from King of the State of Rui (芮) from the Spring-Autumn Period (771--476 BC) in China displays remarkable modern features and is a historical contemporary of the Tagar thimbles.

Chinese Rui thumb ring.(courtesy by Justin Ma from http://www.cinnabarbow.com/marinerbows/jinxian/OriginalRuiRing1.jpg)

So, even if these curious thimbles might not have left their mark in the historical development of archery, but rather got extict like dinosaurs, still, it is an archery challenge to shoot a bronze  Tagar thumb thimble again for the first time in some 2500 years, and also solve the puzzle on how to mount them and how to use them.  So I contacted my friend and bronzesmith Radostin Kolchev from Bulgaria to make me a replica of a Tagar thumb thimble fit to my own thumb size.

The first experiments with the thimble showed what I already feared. You easily shoot the thimble off your thumb, It takes off with your arrow :)  so I had to look for ways to secure the thimble.

So I came up with this:  I could find no other practical purpose for the two groves on the top of the thimble but to thread a string through these groves and secure that string  to a wrist strap. In my rig I let the two strings cross at the inner side of the thumb, before I attach them to the wrist. This allows for the two strings to prevent the bowstring to slip over and behind the thimble.  

It works now. It doesn’t come off anymore and the thimble is good to shoot. You can bend the thumb, and the strings on the side of the thumb avoid the bowstring from slipping behind the thimble.

It does not perform exactly to my liking or to what I am used to. Personally I’d rather customize the shape of the thimble a bit, and add a ridge to the thimble on the inside of the thumb to avoid the string from slipping behind the thimble, (the string rigging to the wrist strap works, but some alterations to the thimble itself might even work more secure)  or apply a string grove to keep it in place during the draw- just like the antique Chinese thumb rings have- or even better: apply both like in the Rui thumb rings.  However,  the antique  8^th to 3th century BC Tagar thimbles are what they are..without a ridge and a string grove. 

Only the small holes on the inside of the thimbles are a puzzle still to be solved. All of the excavated thimbles have such a small hole, so they must have been there for a reason. Still puzzling...

Just asking myself... Now, if i were to tread a string through this hole, and tie it off on top of it with a knot, would that knot have the same effect as a string grove? I challenge everybody to solve this riddle. What is that hole for ? And this is wat defenitely makes this kind of experimental archery archeology fun. Of course we will never know for sure if the applications and solutions we come up with to get these curious archery artifacts to work are historically correct- as we are lacking conclusive archeological evidence, but it has merit. As archers, and not as archeologists who just dig things out of the ground and date, categorize, and classify them and put them in a box of Museum depots afterwards, we shoot bows and know how to use these, we know what we like and what we don't like as we shoot our bows, and we might have a much better idea on what its original purpose and its method of employment of such an archery artifact was. 

Hope you enyoy! Cheers, Ataelus. 

Thanks to Zoran Pavlovic for translating the comments on the pictures from Russian into English, to Radostin Kolchev for making these replica's, and to Justin Ma for allowing me to use some of his pictures of the Chinese Rui thumb rings. 

Post scriptum: 
Experimental archeology is an ongoing process. As stated above with the rigging I devised the thimble was shootable, but I was not really pleased with its usability. The bronze surface is very smooth and off and on the bowstring kept slipping over the thimble onto the thumb itself during the draw. With the bowstring behind the thimble, that is of course the perfect position to shoot it off despite the rigging I devised, and such misfits turned out quite painful.  As an archer you want a reliable piece of working gear. 
Most friendly archers taking part in the `solve the purpose of the hole' mystery also agreed that the most plausible use of that hole would be to prevent the bowsgtring from slipping over the thimble by threading a piece of leather or a string through it. 

Now eventually I have settled for this option. 

I did strengthen the linen thread I used with some hide glue to improve its durability

Yep. tried it out this morning. With the rigging and the thread through the hole this Skytian/Tagar thumb thimble system is now fully functional, usable  and reliable, and in no way inferior to a thumb ring. 

Here is a video. 

Facit: Of course my experimental rigging and the backstop are hypothetical, but they stand to reason from the viewpoint of the practical archer. The rigging prevents the thimble from taking off together with your arrow, and the backstop through the hole prevents the slipping of the bowstring over the thimble, so you have both a reliable and usable thumb- draw archery system.

It is great fun shooting and toying with these curious archery artifacts from the past.

Hope you enjoy ! Ataelus.