Mounted Archery in the Americas

Publisher Marketing: This fascinating and amply illustrated book charts the history of mounted archery from its ancient roots on the steppes of Eurasia thousands of years ago to its current resurgence in popularity in the Americas. It also provides the reader with up-to-the-minute practical information gleaned from a unique team of the world s leading experts. Mounted archery is shooting the bow and arrow from horseback at the canter and after a century and a half of neglect on the Great Plains of North America, interest in this thrilling activity is rapidly spreading from the Arctic Circle to the Tropic of Capricorn. This is the story of the reappearance of this exciting discipline in the Americas. Horseback archery has its origins in two of the great grasslands of the world the United States Great Plains, and the vast steppes of Eurasia. As far back as 3,000 years ago Asian mounted warriors thundered down on their enemies in lightning surprise attacks, loosing showers of arrows which stunned and hopelessly dissembled their pedestrian opposition. The horseback archery culture of the American Indians reached a similar level of development and sophistication, but emerged much later and was a shorter phenomenon. Horses spread north from the Spanish colony of Mexico through the Plains beginning in the mid 1600 s, but this dynamic equestrian culture virtually vanished with the demise of the buffalo in the mid 1800 s. Yet this mounted tradition was revived when, in 1998, Kassai Lajos, the legendary Hungarian founder of the modern standardized discipline of mounted archery, came to the United States for now-legendary demonstration. The world s leading mounted archer returned for three subsequent training camps which inspired many others to take up the sport. Since then, mounted archery has spread with great enthusiasm across the United States, Canada and South America. This challenging and engaging discipline is promoted by the Mounted Archery Association of the Americas, and the royalties from this ground-breaking study of this ancient equestrian art are being donated to this Association. Contributor Bio:  Gray, David DAVID GRAY (PhD University of New South Wales) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department Marketing and Management at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Prior to his academic career, David was the General Manager Marketing at Touche Ross & Co, and the National Marketing Manager at MGICA Ltd (a subsidiary of AMP), and held various marketing research roles in Citicorp Australia, BIS Shrapnel, CSR Ltd and KPMG. Contributor Bio:  Novotny, Lukas Lukas Novotny is Professor of Optics and Physics at the University of Rochester where he heads the Nano-Optics Research Group at the Institute of Optics. He received his Ph. D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland and later joined the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Washington, USA) as a research fellow, working in the Chemical Structure and Dynamics Group. In 1999, he joined the faculty of the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester and developed a course on nano-optics which has been taught several times at the graduate level and which forms the basis of this textbook. His general interest is in nanoscale light-matter interactions ranging from questions in solid-state physics to biophysics.