In comments to the previous post, pato’ links to a recent press release on the discovery of an atlatl dart in a melting ice patch near Yellowstone. This type of discovery is becoming more common as global warming causes ice patches and glaciers to melt at an unprecedented rate, releasing artifacts that have been frozen in them for centuries or millennia. Because of the protective qualities of the ice, artifacts made of perishable materials like wood like atlatls and darts often survive there. These discoveries are particularly helpful for the study of hunting paraphernalia, because many of the artifacts in the ice got there when they were lost during hunting expeditions in harsh territory that would have been unsuitable for permanent or temporary habitation. Quentin Mackie has a good discussion of this find and ice patch archaeology in general in which he links to an earlier post of his discussing a much earlier find from British Columbia.
That find was a projectile, made of wood with attached stone point, found by a surveyor near Tsitsutl Peak in 1924. It was mentioned briefly in news reports at the time, then disappeared into the collections of the Royal British Columbia Museum until it was rediscovered by a curator there who did some testing of it that was published in 2005. Radiocarbon dating of the wood came up with a 2-sigma calibrated range of AD 1482 to 1639. An unsuccessful attempt was made to date a sample of the sinew used to haft the point to the shaft as well. This is quite late, and it suggest that the weapon is an arrow rather than an atlatl dart, as the bow and arrow would certainly have been introduced by that time and the general thinking in this region is that the atlatl was no longer in use then.
The problem with this conclusion in this case, however, is that the thing is huge. Including the point, it’s 89.5 cm long and broken at the end, indicating that it was originally even longer. The shaft alone (excluding the point) is 86.2 cm long. Recent ice patch finds from the Yukon, discussed by the authors of the paper as a comparative context for the Tsitsutl artifact, show that late prehistoric arrows have shafts ranging in length from 52 to 73 cm, all much smaller. Atlatl darts from the Yukon are larger, and some are around the same size as the Tsitstul artifact, which the authors estimate to have probably been about 120 cm long originally. Comparison to some other methods for determining if a point came from an arrow or a dart reveals that the Tsitsutl point doesn’t exactly match either the dart or arrow point characteristics, but in most size attributes it is closer to the dart side. There is also some ethnographic and ethnohistoric evidence of atlatl use in the contact period on the northern Northwest coast, including an eyewitness account of atlatl use in maritime hunting among the Tlingit in 1788 and a few Tlingit atlatls from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in museum ethnographic collections. Tsitsutl Peak is not in ethnographic Tlingit territory, but it isn’t very far away and certainly part of the same general cultural area. The Tsitsutl artifact is also made of yew, which was not a common type of wood used for arrows ethnographically.
Now, I look at that evidence and conclude that this is probably an atlatl dart, and that it therefore suggests that the atlatl was in use in this area for longer than archaeologists have generally thought. Perhaps, as in the Arctic, the atlatl was used primarily for maritime hunting while the bow and arrow was used on land, although the fact that this artifact came from an inland setting is problematic for that theory. Oddly, however, the authors of the paper analyzing it conclude that it must be considered an arrow, apparently based almost entirely on the late date and a supposed resemblance in form to arrows and lack of resemblance to known atlatl darts (which are of course much older). They even say that the late date on the wood is so reliable that it doesn’t matter that the attempt to date the sinew failed! In this circumstance, where the dating doesn’t clearly match the expected form of the artifact, I would say that it would be particularly important to get as many dates as possible. They don’t really explain why they don’t find the similarity in size to known atlatl darts and the ethnohistoric evidence convincing. Certainly there are problems with classifying weapons as darts or arrows based solely on size, an issue that I’ll discuss in a later post, but the size difference between the two is pretty well established ethnographically and archaeologically and I think they should have at least acknowledged that and explained their reasoning in making their conclusion contrary to that line of evidence.
While some aspects of the paper’s discussion strike me as dubious, this is an important find, and it’s good to see it published after languishing in obscurity for so long. Ice patch archaeology has a lot of potential for improving our understanding of the past, but that potential can only be realized if the stuff is collected, studied, and published.
Keddie, G., & Nelson, E. (2005). An Arrow from the Tsitsutl Glacier, British Columbia Canadian Journal of Archaeology, 29, 113-123
Yew can be a very long lived tree. There could be yew trees alive now that have wood that would carbon date to that era.
The wood could date much earlier than the sinew. But sinew would be much more perishible in the environment and I have a hard time believing would persist even a few years not in ice.
Yeah, old wood is a constant problem with this sort of dating, which is why I was particularly puzzled that they didn’t make any further attempts to date the sinew. The chronological oddity here is in the other direction, however, so if old wood were involved it would raise more questions than it answered.
thank you for your blog! I look forward to every new post having been an anasazi enthusiast since my first trip to the four corners ten years ago. Keep up the great work.