weapons in the solomon islands.
 

well in several documentaries abou the solomon islands ive observed some non traditional but indiginous weapons being carried,

one interesting thing ive noticed in past footage on the unrest is .50 caliber single shot rifles made from ww2 american machine gun barrels!!.
anyway to a more ethnograpic weapon, it showed in a report some captured barbed darts. the australian solider says "theyer barbed for use in slingshots"
now i wounder ehat this slingshot is. i am suspecting it is a sort of harpoon gun as ive seen these wepaons that were made in boganville that worked like a harpoon gun to fire a steel dart with the power of a spring and rubber bands,
but these darts have tassels on them, so maybe they are some odd form of whipping dart.. or...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbH1Y...eature=related
i do wounder how theyer used,

Could be like a crossbow?

I think it's perhaps called a "Pana" in the Philippines. However, Google doesn't turn it up on "Pana," and I'm not sure what the real name is. I got this from a guy in the US who's selling something similar. "Pana" link

Basically, it's a single band slingshot (i.e. a stick with a large rubber band attached), with a loop on the end of the rubber. The dart is hooked to the end of the rubber, stretched out, and fired. Not really a crossbow, just an outgrowth of our modern elastic technology.

F

yeah, rely it looks like it , i wounder how it got all the way to the solomons...
the spear guns they make in boganville are quite lethal and are working out to about 20 or 30 meters on land, :O,,,, like harpoon gun with a barrel and a smaller steel and wood dart..
they are looking almost gun like from a distance look like a shotgun or something.. interesting idea i dont know why they didnt just use their traditional bows, i guess it was a attempt to simulate a firearm with the materials thye had..
ill see if i can find pictures of one..

Hi Ausjulius,

Just guessing, but there are a couple of things going on here culturally.

Remember that the Solomons are one of the places where "cargo cults" showed up. I'm not saying that the islanders are stupid (they're not), but a couple of generations ago they went through big time culture shock, and I'll bet that, to this day, they value outside "Western" goods more than they value "bush" goods, except when tourists buy bush goods as art and artifacts (not that we do this on this website :rolleyes:)

This is helped by traders selling things like rubber bands and speargun slings pretty cheaply.

My guess is that either they saw the "Pana" (or whatever it's called) because some Philippino fisherman had one. Or a sailor saw one in the Philippines and brought one home (or took the idea home). Or they just got the idea from looking at spearguns and fishing spears. There is enough boat traffic in that region that I'm not surprised that the idea transferred. It's really an urban weapon, anyway, since the metal for the dart and the rubber for the band have to be imported.

Anyway, the pana is "western," it's cheap, it works, and actually, it is a lot easier to conceal than a 4' longbow, which is what they'd be using if they went the traditional route.

F