[btilly]

Given the amount of effort he spends to find what actual ancient texts, ancient pictures, and reproducing exactly that, I think he has a pretty good claim to be trying to reproduce actual specific historical styles.

In later videos he talks about not just historical archery, but specific styles used by specific people with references.

[isitmadeofglass]

That’s not how the sciences work. Historians don’t invent a narrative and then go through ancient texts trying to find pictures and snippets they can use to back up their narrative. You start from the source, study it and try to deduce the truth, and you can try to craft a narrative that portrays that truth as accurately as possible.

> In later videos he talks about not just historical archery, but specific styles

Yes he talks a lot about it and everything he makes up gets quickly and thoroughly debunked. He might as well be claiming that aliens invented archery. He’s a fraud who’s good with a acrobatic trick shots with bow and arrow, not a historian.

[btilly]

I've seen his version, and I've the attempts to debunk. I've also seen his attempts to debunk the debunkers, and so on

I am emphatically not convinced by the attempts to debunk.

Furthermore there is a situation where Lars clearly did start with a source, and attempted to reproduce exactly that. In other words he did what you say he didn't. Does he know what the thing he found is the way it was actually done? He doesn't, and says so. But it is one way it could have been done, and reproduces the historical feats of archery.

It started when a group of Native Americans pointed out in https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/videos-lost-and-found... that they have maintained an archery tradition that Lars had ignored. However after Lars talked with actual Comanches, he found that they had lost the technique by which the Comanches fired so quickly. A technique which, according to both pictures and books, was completely different than the style that Lars had figured out based on Arab and Asian sources. They could still make and shoot the bows an arrows, but not at the speed described in history books.

And so, working with a Comanche archer and with authentic Comanche bows and arrows, Lars experimented until to find a method that fit the historical record. He was able to achieve historical speed and accuracy with a very different technique than he used before. Yes, he did it from from horseback, and whoed it could be done while hanging off of horseback. (He doesn't appear to be good enough to actually do it at speed while hanging off an actual horse, but that is a question of horsemanship, not of archery.)

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liHlCRpS70k for Lars' version of this. And https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMWOUCuZ-kQ for the Comanche he worked with.

If you're a glutton for punishment, he explains himself at length in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4mqt69VZ28. And you get to see what he thinks he got right, what he thinks he got wrong, and the limits of what he claims to know.

The most interesting point for me is that practice with shooting moving things interferes with shooting at a stationary target, and vice versa. This "two related things interfere with each other in your brain" is something I've personally experienced with Go vs Chess. But it is fascinating that it happens with archery.