American indians' horses had leather armor -

[RedKnight]

but only for a brief time. This was news to me. Check this article at Archeology magazine:

http://www.archaeology.org/0409/newsbriefs/leather.html

How about that! ~:cheers:

[Ichiro1234]

Thats a pretty cool find!, but if you think about it not very surprising. I think that horses were a very important asset so would have been protected as such. And leather was probably pretty easy to find and make. But im not really sure, did a lot of the tribes use metal spears, arrows etc, if they didnt i guess leather would have been like metal armor.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

The indians also used to wear wooden armor for going into battle. Stopped this when the europeans came though I think.

[Ichiro1234]

The indians also used to wear wooden armor for going into battle. Stopped this when the europeans came though I think.


this actually makes a lot of sense, wood can stop arrows well, and its kind of hard to stab through wood, but flaming arrows would be a little messy..... ~:)

[ah_dut]

I wonder why wooden armour wasn't popular in Europe in medieval times?

[Red Raptor Guy]

Well, it didn't give the same protection as metal, and to give maximium movement, you had to do alot to the wood to curve it. For medieval Europe, they used alot of flaming arrows especially during castle assualts.

[DisruptorX]

The native americans neved discovered how to use metal, therefore they didn't have much need to protect against it.

[Oaty]

Well, it didn't give the same protection as metal, and to give maximium movement, you had to do alot to the wood to curve it. For medieval Europe, they used alot of flaming arrows especially during castle assualts.


Wood is very easy to curve. Depending how much of a curve you want depends how long you soak it. The soaking may take a while but the actual labour that goes into it is usually very minimal. 1 weeks soak time is usually enough time for an extensive curve. The question would be did the indains know how to curve the wood?

A few example would be wooden barrels and rowboats. Usually the wood that is used for them is very straight and you can see the curvature that is there. Barrels are'nt curved to much but look at a rowboats front end, that is a decent curve on a plank of wood that used to be straight.


As far as there arrow tips spear tips and tomahawks they were all stone and carved for a very sharp edge and for sewing they would use slithers from antlers for a needle. Some indian tribes would use 100 percent of the animal that they killed, it was part of there religion.