Atlatls to Bows: More on the Skagit River Atlatl

Starbucks, New Brunswick, New Jersey

My post on the atlatl found at the mouth of the Skagit River north of Seattle seems to have led one reader to ask about it in a forum for modern atlatl makers and users.  The responses are interesting.  One respondent linked to an article from the 1960s with more detailed information which is available free online.  This article, by Charles Borden, has some very good pictures of the atlatl, which was at some point acquired by the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, which has even better pictures and more information on its website.  Borden’s analysis focuses mainly on the iconography of the elaborately carved figure, which he puts in the context of ethnographically known imagery from various Northwest Coast cultures representing sea monsters and other mythological creatures with similar characteristics to the one on the atlatl.  He argues, not entirely convincingly, that it represents an early form of the important creature known as the Sisiutl, which is usually represented as a two-headed snake but which can take on other forms as well.  Whether or not he is right about that particular identification, Borden does make a convincing case that the atlatl fits easily into the artistic traditions of the Northwest rather than being an import from elsewhere.  He also argues that it is likely very old, and tentatively suggests that it may be contemporaneous with the Locarno Beach site in Vancouver, which produced an atlatl hook made of antler.  The Locarno Beach site defined the Locarno Beach Phase, which now seems to be dated to around 3500 to 2500 radiocarbon years before present.  As I mentioned in the previous post, the Skagit River atlatl was apparently later radiocarbon dated directly and assigned to the Marpole Phase, which dates to around 2000 to 1500 radiocarbon years before present.  (According to the UBC Museum website the exact date was around 200 AD.)  Borden was therefore off by quite a bit in suggesting that the atlatl was contemporaneous with Locarno Beach, but of course he had less information to go by than is available now.

Also, John Palter recently commented on a post in which I discussed an article of his on atlatl weights, pointing to a more recent article in which he bolsters his theory that they were associated with flexible atlatls by discussing the attitudes of modern atlatl users toward the advantages of flexible, weighted atlatls over more rigid types.  As with the forum discussion on the Skagit River atlatl, this shows the interesting insights on atlatl use that can come from the large corps of amateur atlatl users and their extensive experimental experience with atlatls.  This is a very different approach to learning about atlatls than the abstract study of surviving ancient specimens more typical of archaeologists, and I think the two approaches used together can be quite complementary. I’ve mentioned this issue before with regard to interpretation of an atlatl petroglyph.

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Why No Wheels?

Wheels at Chaco Museum from Ore Cart Used to Haul Fill from Pueblo Bonito

I’m back at Chaco and giving tours again, so I’m once again being exposed to visitors’ common questions and preconceptions in a way I haven’t been in a long time.  One thing that seems to surprise a lot of visitors is the fact that the Chacoans apparently had no knowledge of the wheel, or if they did have such knowledge they didn’t apply it to transport any of the many things they brought into the canyon from distant sources.  (People are also sometimes surprised to learn that they didn’t have draft animals either, which I find a bit surprising myself since I tend to think of that as common knowledge.)

I think it’s actually not difficult to see why the Chacoans wouldn’t have seen any use for the wheel even if they somehow knew about it, and the lack of draft animals is the key to understanding why.  (This is admittedly a bit speculative on my part, but I think it works.)  Without big, strong animals to pull wheeled vehicles, any efficiency gains from them in terms of human labor would be decidedly non-obvious.  The only type of wheeled vehicle that would really be effective using only human labor would be the wheelbarrow, and while this may provide some efficiency gains over carrying goods by hand I don’t think they would have been clear enough to compensate for the increased effort involved in building the thing, especially given the often rough and broken terrain of the Southwest.  Even the Chacoan roads, which may or may not have actually been intended for use in transporting goods but certainly could have been so used once they were built, were actually not as level and easy as people often assume, although they were more level than the surrounding terrain.  Most of the effort put into the roads went into clearing the surface and defining the curbs, but grading of the cleared ground surface was typically not done and the road beds follow the underlying terrain for the most part.  This was fine for foot traffic, and definitely an improvement over the uncleared surrounding terrain, but it wouldn’t have been particularly suitable for wheeled vehicles.  Furthermore, the vaunted straightness of the roads would actually have made them even less suitable for wheeled vehicles or draft animals, given the common practice of handling steep cliffs in the path of the road with stairways.  Good luck getting a cart up or down one of those!

Jackson Stairway

The lack of draft animals and the unevenness of the terrain have also been posited as reasons for the lack of wheeled vehicles throughout the Americas.  While the terrain would not have been an impediment everywhere, such as in the Yucatan where the terrain is generally flat and the roads built by the Maya were much more elaborate and level than anything seen around Chaco, in highland areas like Central Mexico and lowland areas covered by dense vegetation such as those along the Gulf Coast of Mexico the maneuverability of a person on foot would likely have been far more important to efficient transportation than any increase in efficiency resulting from wheeled vehicles in the absence of animals to pull them.  Gordon Ekholm of the American Museum of Natural History, whom we last saw discovering atlatl finger loops, discussed many of these issues in an interesting article from 1946 about the wheeled toys found in various parts of Mexico, which demonstrate that at least the Mesoamericans were in fact aware of the wheel even though they didn’t use it for any practical purpose.  These clay toys, in the form of animals with wheels in place of feet, had been found in widely scattered parts of Central and Northeast Mexico, from Oaxaca to Veracruz, and while the axles connecting the wheels to the feet were apparently made of a perishable material like wood and did not survive, the fact that one example was found in situ with the wheels in the proper position led Ekholm to conclude that they definitely were originally wheeled.  Robert Lister (a very prominent figure in the history of Chacoan archaeology who also did some work in Mesoamerica) followed up on Ekholm’s article shortly afterward, noting the apparent presence of similar wheeled toys in West Mexico and referring to the discovery of copper examples in Panama as well.

Effigy Vessels at Chaco Museum

Ekholm’s article provides a solid discussion of the implication of these toys for Mesoamerican technology and general anthropological understanding of technological development.  He discusses the lack of draft animals and the difficult terrain, but ultimately concludes that the main factor preventing more widespread use of the wheel was likely a cultural and technological conservatism that privileged the old way of doing things, which in this case meant carrying goods on people’s backs, over an untried new invention like the wheel.  He attributes the origin of the idea of wheeled toys to pure invention, probably stemming from experimentation with the round spindle whorls that are very common Mesoamerican artifacts.  It’s not clear just how far this idea spread, and to my knowledge there is no evidence that anyone in the Southwest was aware of it, although some of the ceramic animal effigies found at Chaco and elsewhere do bear some resemblance to the Mesoamerican toys.  Ekholm makes a convincing case that despite the ingenious nature of these toys, without suitable social and ecological conditions for the wider adoption of the technology it remained more of a curiosity than anything else.

Basically, without draft animals, the idea of making a big vehicle like a cart which could carry a heavy load more efficiently than a person could would be unlikely to have occurred to anyone, because such a cart would still have to be pulled by people.  Or, in other words, if you have a cart but not a horse, you are, well, putting the cart before the horse.  And who would do a thing like that?

Ekholm, G. (1946). Wheeled Toys in Mexico American Antiquity, 11 (4) DOI: 10.2307/275722

Lister, R. (1947). Additional Evidence of Wheeled Toys in Mexico American Antiquity, 12 (3) DOI: 10.2307/275708

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Atlatls to Bows: A Suspiciously Large Arrow

Big Arrow, Albuquerque, New Mexico

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.

Closeup of Big Arrow, Albuquerque, New Mexico

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

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Atlatls to Bows: A Serendipitous Lion Hunt

Very Large Array, Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico

Like atlatls, but to an even greater degree, bows are rare in the archaeological record because they were made of perishable materials.  While some types of atlatls had more durable attachments such as hooks and weights, bows were almost always made of wood and various fibrous materials, except in some areas where they were made of horn or antler.  Bows are thus exceedingly rare in the archaeological record, and when they do appear it is usually just as fragments.  Many museums have large collections of complete bows, but these come almost entirely from modern ethnographic collections and are not necessarily the same types that were used in antiquity.  Indeed, there seems to have been a major change in bow technology in the late prehistoric period throughout North America, in which the simple self bow was replaced by a more elaborate sinew-backed recurved type which was both smaller and more powerful.  Ethnographic examples are almost always recurved, so understanding the older self bows requires study of the few archaeological examples available.  These survive only under conditions of exceptional preservation, such as in caves and rockshelters.

One important discovery came about rather accidentally.  In the 1930s, the University of New Mexico did some archaeological surveys in the southwestern part of the state, particularly in the relatively unexplored area in and around the Gila Mountains, between the Plains of San Agustin to the north and the well-known Mimbres Valley, famous for its black-on-white pottery, to the south.  During one of these surveys, near Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, Frank Hibben, a graduate student at UNM who would go on to have a long career there as a professor of anthropology and director of the Maxwell Museum, decided to take a break to hunt mountain lions.  (Hibben was an odd guy.)  He chased one particular lion for many miles along the canyons and cliffs, and eventually followed its tracks into a small cliff dwelling high up on a canyon wall.

Looking South from Very Large Array, Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico

When he entered the site, Hibben found to his surprise a pile of bows, which had apparently originally been stacked in a corner but had been largely scattered and broken throughout the room.  Furthermore, there were arrows strewn all across the floor of the site and the cave in which is was situated, also broken.  There were about 94 bows and 4,000 arrows, an astonishingly high number.  While they all appeared to be broken, probably by bears who had used the cave as a lair in the time since its abandonment, the sheer number of specimens made this cache an unparalleled resource for understanding early Southwestern weaponry.  Realizing the importance of his discovery, Hibben collected the bows and brought them back for further study, after which he wrote a short article describing them which was published in American Antiquity in 1938.

The article is short and doesn’t give nearly as much information about the bows and arrows as would be ideal, but it does mention certain characteristics which are important in comparing these bows to other prehistoric and ethnographic examples.  These all appear to have been self bows; Hibben made no mention of any sinew backing or recurving.  They were also large.  The average length of the restorable ones was about four and a half feet, and the longest was almost five feet long.  The shortest was about three feet long, which Hibben described as “too small for any serious use,” although this is a typical length for recurved bows.  Only one bow retained any fragment of bowstring, and it was made of yucca fiber.  Sixteen bows were decorated with red or black stripes.

Railroad Crossing, Very Large Array, Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico

Hibben was unable to determine the type of wood for all of the bows, but from the ones that could be determined it was clear that oak was the preferred material.  Other identified woods were piñon, (ponderosa?) pine, willow, mountain mahogany, and sycamore.  (Note the absence of juniper, which will be important later.)  Interestingly, the bowyers don’t seem to have selected particularly fine staves from which to make the bows, and knots are frequent.  The surfaces,  however, were finely finished and probably polished, suggesting that a considerable amount of effort did go into making these bows.

The most interesting thing about the arrows is that out of the thousands in the cave, only eleven had notches for stone heads to be attached.  The rest were merely sharpened to create wooden points.  This is important to keep in mind, given the large role arrowheads tend to play in theories about prehistoric weaponry.  It’s understandable, since stone projectile points are the most durable parts of any weapon system, but if this ratio of stone to wooden points is typical (and there is of course no way to tell if it is) it suggests that stone points may not actually have been nearly as central as archaeologists often assume.  The arrows were also elaborately decorated in a variety of designs and colors which Hibben interpreted as property marks.

Historic Marker, Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico

There were some sherds of Mimbres Black-on-white pottery associated with the cache, suggesting that it dates to the Classic Mimbres period, ca. AD 1000 to 1150, which would make it contemporaneous with Chaco.  This temporal placement makes sense, since the self bow is known to have been the main weapon used in the Southwest in this period.  The recurved bow was introduced later, perhaps during the period of change and instability in the region around AD 1300, and persisted into historic times.  The persistence of the recurved bow was presumably due to its considerable advantages over the self bow, which faded into the distant past as most examples deteriorated.  One cache, however, survived thanks to its location in a sheltered cave, and was rediscovered due to the efforts of a crafty mountain lion and the archaeologist who pursued it.  Knowledge comes about in odd ways sometimes.

Hibben, F. (1938). A Cache of Wooden Bows from the Mogollon Mountains American Antiquity, 4 (1) DOI: 10.2307/275360

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Atlatls to Bows: A Very Strange Atlatl from Washington State

Starbucks, Durango, Colorado

Sometime in the early 1950s a wooden object was dredged from the mouth of the Skagit River, north of Seattle.  It ended up in the possession of Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Johnson, residents of the nearby town of La Conner.  In 1952 the Johnsons showed it to two local archaeologists, Herbert Taylor of Western Washington College of Education (now Western Washington University) in Bellingham and Warren Caldwell of the University of Washington in Seattle.  Taylor and Caldwell immediately recognized it as an atlatl, but it was unlike any atlatl they had ever seen.  It was about 40 cm long, not an atypical length for a North American atlatl, and its width was also typical, but it had on its upper surface a very elaborate carving, 11 cm high, of what looked like a dragon or lizard.  It also had two carved finger holes, similar to some Mesoamerican examples.  They subsequently searched the archaeological literature on atlatls but could find no other examples anywhere of this kind of carving on an atlatl.  Realizing the uniqueness of this artifact made it an important find, they published a short article on it in American Antiquity in 1954, complete with a rather low-quality photograph.  In the article they noted the various possible explanations for the atlatl’s origin, including the possibility that it was a modern fake, which they disregarded because of its uniqueness (if it was a modern imitation, what on earth could it be an imitation of?), and they concluded that its intact condition suggests it was deposited at or near the river’s mouth rather than floating down the river from somewhere inland.  This left two possibilities: either it was a local example of a previously unknown type of artifact, or it was an artifact from elsewhere that somehow ended up in the area in antiquity.  They also noted that atlatls are not known at all from the Pacific Northwest ethnographically.  They didn’t mention the fact that atlatl weights have been found in the Northwest archaeologically, possibly because the main article describing these finds didn’t come until five years later, but since this atlatl doesn’t seem to have any place to attach a weight that wouldn’t be very relevant anyway.  They didn’t present any theories about where the atlatl may have come from or what it meant, saying only that if the Johnsons agreed they would try to do some more detailed analyses to try to get clearer answers.

Starbucks, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The British Museum‘s catalog entry for the Santa Barbara atlatl (which has similar finger holes) mentions the radiocarbon dating of a “highly decorated atlatl, dredged up from the Skagit River in the 1950s and dated to the Marpole phase of the Northwest Coast archaeological record,” presumably this one, but the reference is to a 1987 article in the Canadian Journal of Archaeology (with a very uninformative abstract) that I have not been able to access, as Rutgers apparently does not subscribe to the paper version of the journal and the electronic version only goes back to 2004.  I may try to track down a copy of the journal to see the article, since it would be very interesting to see the actual date.  The Marpole phase apparently dates to the late centuries BC and the early centuries AD, although the exact dates given in different sources vary.  In any case, it’s a very mysterious item, and unlike the Santa Barbara example there’s no obviously plausible explanation for it.  It could just be that atlatls like this were common in the Northwest at this time but since they were made entirely of wood none of the others have survived in the very wet climate (probably the most likely explanation).  The idea that it was an import from somewhere else is tempting given its uniqueness, but where could it have come from?  Interestingly, the only atlatls I know of with elaborate carving like this on the top are some ethnographic examples from New Guinea in the Smithsonian, but that’s got to be a coincidence.  Anyway, this is just one more of the many odd little stories in the history of atlatl research.

Taylor, H., & Caldwell, W. (1954). Carved Atlatl from Northwest Coast American Antiquity, 19 (3) DOI: 10.2307/277136

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Atlatls to Bows: A Very Strange Atlatl from California

Higuera Street, San Luis Obispo, California

In November of 1793 a British naval expedition commanded by Captain George Vancouver arrived at the small Spanish settlement of Santa Barbara on the coast of California.  Vancouver’s primary mission was to explore and map the poorly understood northwest coast of North America, building on the more preliminary information provided earlier by Captain James Cook.  He was quite successful at this, and the detailed maps produced by his expedition greatly enhanced British understanding of this area, which was becoming very important geopolitically as a result of its potential resources and increasing competition among Britain, Spain, and Russia to claim it.  When he arrived at Santa Barbara he was headed south, having spent the spring and summer exploring the area around the island that now bears his name and bound for Hawaii to spend the winter.  He anchored off of Santa Barbara for eight days to rest and resupply, and his men took advantage of the opportunity to trade with the local Spanish and Chumash inhabitants.  Mission Santa Barbara was only a few years old, having been established in 1786, and the presidio where Spanish soldiers were garrisoned was only four years older than that.  Although the Chumash had been in contact with the Spanish since the Cabrillo expedition of 1542, the permanent Spanish presence in their territory dated only to the establishment of Mission San Luis Obispo in 1772, and at the time Vancouver’s expedition stopped by they were only just beginning to move to the missions and experience the profound and complicated cultural changes that would result.

Chamber of Commerce, San Luis Obispo, California

George Goodman Hewett, Surgeon’s First Mate on Vancouver’s flagship, HMS Discovery, was among the members of the expedition who did some trading with the locals at Santa Barbara.  Hewett apparently had a strong interest in the customs and lifestyles of the various peoples the expedition encountered, and he collected from them various items of material culture whenever possible.  Over the course of the four years that the expedition ended up taking he acquired a substantial collection.  While the greatest number of items in the collection were from the places the expedition spent the most time, particularly Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest, the items from Santa Barbara were (and are) of particular interest to later anthropologists, since Hewett collected them at a time when traditional Chumash culture, now known primarily from the very detailed but nevertheless retrospective ethnographic fieldwork of John Peabody Harrington in the early twentieth century, was still mostly intact and only beginning to be affected by missionization and Spanish contact.  Hewett’s collection remained in his family until 1891, when it was acquired by the British Museum, where it remains.  A description of some of the most significant items was published by Charles H. Read in 1892.

Hill, San Luis Obispo, California

Read’s description included two atlatls.  One is an elaborately carved example from southeast Alaska, where use of the atlatl is known to have persisted into modern times, perhaps because of its usefulness in fishing and maritime hunting compared to the bow.  The other is from Santa Barbara.

First Bank of San Luis Obispo, San Luis Obispo, California

The Santa Barbara atlatl, as it has been known ever since Read’s publication, is very odd for a number of reasons.  For one thing, just at the outset, the idea of the atlatl being used at Santa Barbara in the late eighteenth century is odd.  California is one area where the replacement of the atlatl by the bow and arrow, whenever it happened, is widely agreed to have been complete by long before then.  While atlatl hooks have been found in early archaeological contexts in various parts of the state, including the Chumash area, there is no evidence of atlatl use from later prehistoric contexts, and the copious ethnohistoric and ethnographic literature on the Chumash nowhere mentions the atlatl, whereas the importance of the bow and arrow is discussed many times.  Read was not in a position to know any of this, of course, since this understanding of the culture history of the area came long after his time.

San Luis Surf, San Luis Obispo, California

Furthermore, the form of the atlatl itself is odd.  While archaeological and ethnographic examples from North America, including the Alaskan ones from the Hewett collection, are typically long and thin, the Santa Barbara specimen is short and thick.  While most atlatls are about half a meter long, this one is only 15 cm long, and nearly as wide.  Furthermore, while North American examples typically have either attached leather finger loops or none at all, this one has two large holes carved out of the wood itself.  The wood seems to be a local type, and no one has questioned the authenticity of the specimen or Hewett’s account of its origin (Read notes that Hewett’s record-keeping was pretty good by the standards of his time), but it’s all very odd and hard to explain.  If it represents a survival from a local atlatl tradition, this tradition is suspiciously absent entirely from both the archaeological and ethnographic records.  While it’s true that atlatls, being made of wood, rarely survive archaeologically, this one does have a bone hook, so if it represents a survival of an ancient atlatl type that continued in use after the adoption of the bow and arrow it would be reasonable to expect at least one similar bone hook to survive somewhere, and this still doesn’t address the lack of ethnographic evidence.

Street Signs, San Luis Obispo, California

Nevertheless, the Santa Barbara was generally accepted as an unusual but indigenous type of atlatl until 1938, when the prominent California archaeologist Robert Heizer published an article looking at the issue and coming to a quite different conclusion.  Heizer pointed out the lack of any other evidence for this type of atlatl as well as all the oddities of the Santa Barbara specimen compared to other examples, and went a step further by noting that it bore a striking similarity to the atlatls still in active use at that time by the Tarascans of western Mexico (remember them?).  These also have paired finger-holes carved out of the wood, and have the same widening of the body of the atlatl around the holes.  The dimensions are still different; the Tarascan examples are much longer and thinner than the Santa Barbara one.  There is still a remarkable similarity, however, and Heizer goes on to point out that the Spanish were known to use Tarascans and other Indians from previously colonized parts of Mexico as settlers on the frontier, particularly in the northwest, which is where the expeditions that colonized California in the 1770s are known to have started.  Although there is no direct evidence that the Spanish soldiers and missionaries in California were accompanied by Mexican Indians, given typical Spanish practices it would not be a surprise.  This, combined with the striking similarities between the Santa Barbara atlatl and Tarascan ones, leads Heizer to propose that the Santa Barbara example is not a survival at all, but a reintroduction of the atlatl to the area from Mesoamerica, where it remained in use long after the Spanish conquest.  The Santa Barbara one is clearly of local manufacture, however, which suggests that this process did not simply involve Tarascans bringing their own atlatls to California, although that was presumably part of it.  Rather, once the Mexican Indians were there, they apparently showed the Chumash the use of the atlatl, which they used for fishing and hunting in maritime settings, and the Chumash (who were a coastal people very oriented toward the sea) were sufficiently impressed to copy it themselves.  Since it apparently did not become established securely enough to be noticed or mentioned by either the Spanish or later ethnographers, the Chumash don’t seem to have ultimately decided to adopt it as a core part of their culture or subsistence system, but they do seem to have at least tried it out.  Indeed, Hewett may have encountered the Chumash at a time of experimentation connected to the changes associated with the transition to mission life, and his acquisition of the atlatl may have preserved a moment in time, a tentative embrace of foreign technology that was ultimately rejected and that would therefore otherwise be unknown to history.  Along the same lines, it’s worth wondering why the Chumash were willing to part with this obviously unusual and presumably rare item when all the other things they gave Hewett were rather typical and plentiful items such as bows.  Was whoever tried to copy the Mexican atlatls, or whoever had tried to use the copy made by someone else, displeased with how the experiment had turned out and eager to get rid of the item when a foreigner interested in buying random things showed up?  There’s no real way to tell, of course, and it’s also possible that atlatls like this were used successfully for a while around this time then abandoned for some other reason.  This item is, however, an intriguing window into a complicated past, and it shows that it’s important to look carefully at the stories behind artifacts before constructing theories based on their characteristics.

Heizer, R. (1938). An Inquiry into the Status of the Santa Barbara Spear-Thrower American Antiquity, 4 (2) DOI: 10.2307/275985

Read, C. (1892). An Account of a Collection of Ethnographical Specimens Formed During Vancouver’s Voyage in the Pacific Ocean, 1790-1795 The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 21 DOI: 10.2307/2842277

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Atlatls to Bows: First Things First

The Toes, Kayenta, Arizona

Everyone is familiar with the bow and arrow, but what on earth is an atlatl?  Although this implement was once used all over the world and was an important part of life, in most areas it was replaced by other weapons so long ago that it is no longer remembered, and most people today have never even seen one.  In a few areas, like Mesoamerica and Australia, use of the atlatl continued up to (and beyond) European contact, but throughout most of the world it is known today only from archaeological specimens and reconstructions by interested hobbyists, who are often archers.  One interesting aspect of the study of the atlatl in American archaeology has been the important role played by these amateurs, who have often demonstrated through experiments that the conclusions of archaeologists about the use of atlatls were clearly mistaken.

Slickrock Sandstone, Kayenta, Arizona

An atlatl is basically a device for assisting in throwing a spear.  They are almost always made of wood, which means that archaeologically they rarely survive intact except in very dry areas like the Southwest.  They are typically about half a meter long, and take the form of a long, thin board with a shallow groove running down the middle and a hook or spur at one end to hold the butt end of the spear.  Southwestern examples typically have leather finger loops at the point where the atlatl would be held.  Occasional examples in other areas, as well as the presence of associated artifacts made of more durable materials, have demonstrated the use of the atlatl throughout the Americas, but understandings of how these atlatls were made and how they functioned have been heavily reliant on Southwestern examples, particularly the exceptionally well-preserved ones found in Basketmaker II rockshelters in the Kayenta area by Alfred Kidder and Samuel Guernsey in the early twentieth century.  There is also a considerable amount of ethnohistoric data on the use of the atlatl in Mesoamerica, which is helpful in understanding atlatls elsewhere but must be used cautiously because Mesoamerican atlatls are typically rather different in form from Southwestern ones, and there may have been corresponding functional differences as well.

Sandstone Formations, Kayenta, Arizona

The precise way the atlatl functioned has not always been apparent to archaeologists, who have in general been notably disinclined to experiment, and amateur experimenters using replicas of archaeological atlatls have made important contributions to understanding this.  One such amateur was Calvin D. Howard of Houston, who published a useful paper in American Antiquity in 1974 reporting on his experiments and explaining how an atlatl actually works.  Here is his basic point:

Surprisingly, considering popular consensus, the atlatl is not a catapult or “flipping” device. In fact, during a proper throw, the spur at the aft end of the atlatl reaches no greater elevation than that reached by the handle at the forward end. The spur does not swing upward in an arc, but merely “follows through” in the original portion of the spear’s flight path. Therefore, the most expeditious way to learn the use of the atlatl is to throw the spear with the atlatl exactly the way it is thrown without it.

The atlatl provides greater thrust than the unaided hand simply because it remains in contact with the spear during a greater portion of the total thrust than does the hand.

He later elaborates on this:

When a spear is thrown with the atlatl, the thrust begins with the hand at the same location behind the thrower, that is, as far back as his reach allows. The hand is moved forward along the same necessary straight path toward the target. When the arm nears the outstretched position-the point of release for the hand-held spear-the atlatl is still in contact with the spear. As the hand and the forward end of the atlatl begin the downward curve, the aft end, with the spur still in contact with the spear, continues on the straight thrust line. The atlatl is therefore converting downward curving thrust to straight forward thrust, thereby prolonging contact between spear and thrust. The spear thus receives a greater portion of the total thrust energy expended.

I haven’t used an atlatl myself, so I just have to trust Howard on this.  He also argues, based on his own experiments, that longer spears are more affected by the increase in thrust given by the atlatl relative to a bare-handed throw, and that the increase in thrust due to the atlatl is about 60%, which makes it a very useful device indeed.  He also says that his experiments have shown that atlatl “weights,” stone objects found lashed to most Southwestern archaeological atlatls but unknown in Mesoamerican examples, provide no additional benefit in terms of thrust, and in fact reduce the effectiveness of the atlatl.  The function of these “weights” has been one of the most puzzling issues in the study of atlatls, and I’ll address it in more detail later.

Howard, C. (1974). The Atlatl: Function and Performance American Antiquity, 39 (1) DOI: 10.2307/279223

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