What was the favored weapons of Native Americans around the time that the English in the Jamestown colony arrived.

by intoxicatedw4lrus

And a bit more than just 'bows,' if I may ask?

Reedstilt

This answer is specifically for the Powhatan in Virginia, rather than Native Americans as a whole:

To start with the bows, they were made of locust or witch hazel and were nearly as tall as the archer himself. Contemporary illustrations usually, but not always, depict them with a slight recurve, such as in this illustration of Eiakintomino, an early Powhatan diplomat to England in 1608. You might notice that the bow appears to have some sort of backing, but colonial records don't mention what that might have been or if that was just an artistic flourish. The arrows, on average, were about 45 inches long, fletched with turkey feathers, and made of wood or reeds. They were tipped with a variety of materials, from simply sharpening the tip of the shaft, to bone, to turkey spurs, to beaks, to stone, depending on what was on hand and what the arrow was intended for. Stone points were generally small and triangular. The hunter kept a tool made from antler hanging on his wrist guard, which he could use to re-sharpen the arrowhead or add a few final touches to a new one while on the move. Powhatan bows were accurate at 40 yards, and while they were considerably less accurate at longer ranges, if they happened to hit you, they were still lethal at 120 yards, assuming you weren’t wearing plate armor. They would penetrate the small wooden shields the English were using at the time, but not the thick bark shields that the Powhatan themselves carried.

Melee weapons include the monacock / monohacan, the tomahawk, and something akin to the ball-headed club. The English often referred to the monacock as “swords,” and there were a few different varieties. The common feature is that they’re flatten batons or clubs with at least one edge sharpened. In this illustration by Robert Beverley, you can see a single-edged monacock labeled as “3.” Some monacocks had stone blades set into them, a bit like the more famous macuahuitls of Mesoamerica. Tomahawks were generally socketed ground stone axes like this one. Sometimes the English would use the word tomahawk (which comes from the Powhatan originally) to refer to antler pick-axes as well. Some tomahawks were described as being very long and sharpened at both ends, so their blades might have been more similar to these earlier Mississippian “spuds”, through without the flair at the end which is rather specific to that style. Regardless of what style the Powhatan tomahawk actually was, the stone used to make it would have come largely by trade from the west, since the Tsenacommacah (the Virginia Tidewater region) didn’t have ready access to suitable stone. Since they were mostly made from non-local material anyway, they were quickly replaced with iron axes imported from the English. Not much is known about the ball-headed clubs in the area, if they were even in the area at all. There’s a hammer-like weapon mentioned in colonial records that seems suggestive of ball-headed clubs, but they were more common to the north than in the south, with Powhatans straddling the zone in between. They could be simple in design or more elaborate (both examples are modern reproductions, for the record). What sort of ball-headed club the Powhatans might have used is unknown.

For more information, you’ll probably be interested in Helen Rountree’s The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture and David Jones’ Native North American Armor, Shields, and Fortifications