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Et tu, Clovis? On the Efficacy of the Clovis Point with Dr. Devin Pettigrew - Ep 112
672 Plays3 years ago
On this episode we bring back Dr. Devin Pettigrew to discuss a paper that came out in 2021. The name of that paper is "On the efficacy of Clovis fluted points for hunting proboscideans" by Eren et. al.
Dr. Pettigrew is an experimental archaeologist and together we discuss the pitfalls/successes of this study. We really dive deep into the article and the data they are using to summarize their argument. Dr. Pettigrew also gives us a background in the ballistics of atlatls as well as information around the use of ballistics gel/ceramics to interpret penetration effectiveness. Dr. Pettigrew then tell us about some of his current research and things he is studying.
If you have left a review of the podcast on iTunes or Spotify, please email us at alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com so we can get shipping information to send you a sticker.
If you are listening to this episode on the "Archaeology Podcast Network All Shows Feed," please consider subscribing to the "A Life in Ruins Podcast" channel to support our show. Listening to and downloading our episodes on the A Life in Ruins channel helps our podcast grow. So please, subscribe to the A Life in Ruins Podcast, hosted by the Archaeology Podcast Network, on whichever platform you are using to listen to us on the "All Shows Feed." Support our show by following our channel.
Connect with James on Twitter: @paleoimaging
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/112
Links
Literature Recommendations
- On the efficacy of Clovis fluted points for hunting proboscideans By Eren et al (2021)
- Hunting Caribou: Subsistence Hunting Along the Northern Edge of the Boreal Forest by Henry S. Sharp and Karyn Sharp
- The ballistics of archaic North American atlatls and darts by Devin B. Pettigrew
- Atlatl Vs Bison by John Whittaker and Devin B Pettigrew
- Survival by Hunting: Prehistoric Human Predators and Animal Prey by George Frison
- The Traditional Bowyer's Bible edited by Jim Hamm
Guest Contact
Contact
- Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Twitter: @alifein
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 112 of a Life Ruins Podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living life in ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover, and I am joined by my co-host Connor Jahnen. Apparently David is on an unexpected journey. Some dwarves showed up, he got recruited to deal with some sort of flying lizard. I don't know what the deal is.
00:00:31
Speaker
But today we have with us, once again,
Clovis Points and Proboscidian Hunting
00:00:36
Speaker
Dr. Devin Pettigrew, graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder, who has appeared three times already on episodes 18.2, episode 19, and then to talk about his dissertation, episode 75. And today we are blessed with Devin's presence to talk about another recent experiment that both me, Connor, and David got to take part in, as well as Donnie Dust and some others, Chance Ward, Tom.
00:01:01
Speaker
Don't know Tom's last name. Uh, and, uh, Hanson, that's what I thought Tom Hanson and Phil Britton. Um, but today we're going to be talking about an article that came out relatively recently within the past came out August, 2021. So last, you know, beginning of fall called the, on the efficacy of Clovis fluted points for hunting proboscidians by Aaron at all. So just to start us off, Devin, how are you doing, man?
00:01:28
Speaker
I'm doing pretty good. You know, job search is amazing. It's so, so inspiring and fun. He says it's our chasm. Yes, it's. Yeah, you know, going to school is quite, it's quite a lot of fun in comparison to what comes immediately after, especially if you're trying to go the academic route. So that's where I'm at.
Methodologies and Findings in Clovis Point Experiments
00:01:54
Speaker
Can't relate. However,
00:02:06
Speaker
But more seriously, so I guess, you know, we've been actually, you reached out to us, put this on our radar months ago and we've been talking about it for like,
00:02:16
Speaker
eight months now having you on the podcast to chat about this article and explain some of the main points that are made, the data that's used, and how it could be better. Fortunately, we were able to do this experimental project with you recently up in the mountains to highlight some of the methodologies that could be used and some data that you've gathered collected.
00:02:39
Speaker
Right. To kind of show the efficiency and efficacy of actually of Clovis points. So I guess just starting us off, could you give us a brief summary of Aaron et al's claims in their article in the journal of archaeological science report 39, 2021? Yeah. They kind of approached this topic from two different directions, one being the archeology and the other being an experimental
00:03:06
Speaker
approach or approaches, I should say, because they actually compile a kind of a range of experimental data. And they're looking at impact damages on stone points in terms of the archaeology. Stone points associated with mammoths and, you know, how frequently are they impacted? Typically, if you launch a stone point at something and it hits something hard, it's going to break because stone is very hard, it takes a nice edge, but it's also brittle.
00:03:34
Speaker
So they're looking at frequencies of impact damage on close points and later types of points associated with kill sites. And then in terms of the experimental portion, which is what I would like to focus more on, they're compiling data from a number of different experiments, including a couple of my own. But mainly they're focusing on a controlled experiment that was performed at Kent State.
00:04:01
Speaker
where they tested some different shapes of Clovis points. They weren't, you know, if you picked it up, you wouldn't immediately say that's a Clovis point because they, they took a shirt and they ground it on lapidary equipment to, to shape.
00:04:16
Speaker
like a Clovis point. And then they shot those into clay in the pottery clay as their target. And they had a previous experiment to try and validate pottery clay, which is really important to do. If you're going to use a target simulant as a flush simulant, it should be, you know, you should show it's actually a valid flush simulant. And they just looked at the range of penetration that they were getting into that clay target. The other experiments they could
00:04:44
Speaker
they looked at included various types of targets, a lot of ballistic gelatin targets, and a few experiments with actual animal carcasses like the one I performed on the bison, where you're actually doing what we would call, instead of a controlled experiment, like a traditional lab controlled experiment, you might call it more of a naturalistic
00:05:07
Speaker
or actualistic type of experiment were actually launching darts by hand or shooting actual arrows into an animal carcass. So they compiled all that and they just took a broad look at like mean penetration depths and then compared that with the anatomy, the anatomy of proboscidians of mammoths to get a sense of how Clovis projectile equipment would perform in a hunting kind of scenario.
Critique of Experimental Data and Methodologies
00:05:35
Speaker
I guess to really quickly summarize, they found that closed points have a lower frequency of impact damage than closed points found associated with bison do. So the ones that found associated with NamUs weren't as frequently impacted. That's kind of a real broad overview of that segment.
00:05:55
Speaker
But they also, in terms of penetration depth, they were kind of getting mean, like 20 centimeter deep penetration, which they're saying, basically what they're saying is they don't penetrate as well as we think they ought to. And there's all sorts of, you know, there's a history to this, where Columbus archaeologists, paleo-archaeologists have thought that paleo-endom points were like the epitome of, you know, a really well-designed
00:06:21
Speaker
hunting our mature, stone hunting our mature for hunting and they're saying, not so much, based on what they're finding.
00:06:28
Speaker
That history starts at least at 1989 with George Frison going to Africa and stabbing a proboscidian with the Clovis point and the classic stabby, stabby, I don't know. Well, I find it interesting. One, they cite David. They cite David's thesis and I think they mischaracterize it because they talk about like recent studies show that projectile point that has a small tip cross section and like is optimal. It's like David was trying to figure out
00:06:58
Speaker
if you can identify arrow points versus Clovis at lateral points based on firing them off a bow. So it's like, that's not what he was doing. Of course, when he's firing from a bow and arrow, the smaller arrows or the smaller points are going to be more effective, especially from a modern mechanism. It's like, that's not what David claims. That's not okay.
00:07:20
Speaker
So that actually brings up a really important point, a couple of really important points. One is that... Aren't they all very important points, Devin? Yes. If I was the producer, I would mute you. Yeah.
00:07:48
Speaker
Yeah. What you're saying is a very important point. You're basically, you're saying that they, they used the data from David's experiment
00:08:09
Speaker
in a way that David wasn't setting out to use it. Those aren't the conclusions that he drew from it, and perhaps more importantly, those weren't the questions that he was trying to ask, and that plays back into the experimental results in a lot of ways. How we design an experiment, we're going to set up an experiment to answer certain questions. A lot of times we're trying to
00:08:33
Speaker
use a hypothetical deductive approach where we've got a hypothesis we're trying to test and we have a very specific experimental design that's going to address that. So David's hypothesis wasn't anything approaching how they use that data. Now they have a table of experiments that basically you can make the same kind of complaint about. That doesn't mean that, you know,
00:09:02
Speaker
the way they're using those data isn't at all applicable to what they're trying to say, but it does, you should start off being a little bit careful for that reason.
00:09:14
Speaker
Well, I want to take a point like actually kind of talking about that same table. They only use one of David's points when he used multiple. I think it was like 30, wasn't it, Connor? It was like he used a large amount of the same style of side notch point, but 30 different sizes. And in their table, they just have one.
00:09:35
Speaker
They have one entry, but it has seven samples for it. But they're not the same size. But he shot multiple sizes. He definitely shot more than seven, so they're only picking a couple examples out of that. They're reporting a mean average speed from that. They're also reporting a mean penetration death from my Bison experiment, but they only use the results from the
00:10:05
Speaker
shooting the bow and arrow. And if you recall, the bow and arrow used in that experiment was kind of a, it was like a 50 pound Cherokee bow with a lightweight cane arrow, river cane arrow. Not the
Challenges of Simulating Flesh in Experiments
00:10:20
Speaker
kind of bow and arrow set up that if you were a modern hunter and you were going to kill a bison and somebody said, you know, you can do this hunt, here's a bison, what are you going to use? And you brought that out.
00:10:32
Speaker
Somebody would think you were nuts. They also pulled together mean penetration deaths for my hog experiment. And here's the main point. Bows and arrows, just like bows and arrows, avitals and darts are highly variable weapons. They come in a lot of different sizes. They carry a lot of variable range of momentum, kinetic energy.
00:10:57
Speaker
And what we set out to test in that hog experiment was a range of Aledon dart sizes.
00:11:04
Speaker
including replicas of darts from the Southwest, the U.S. Southwest. These are replicas of what we would call archaeologically a basket maker weapon equipment from the late archaic in the Southwest. So, you know, roughly 2,000 to 4,000 years ago. And they're pretty light. The darts are small and light. They're only like five feet long or so, approaching six feet long in some cases.
00:11:28
Speaker
And so I was really interested in these weapons for quite a long time. And I wanted to know, could you hunt a bison with one of these? And so when I did my master's thesis, I really wanted a bison. Actually, I wanted one from my, since my honors thesis from my undergrad. At that time I got a dead bloated cow. And then from my master's thesis, I got a pig instead of a bison. But we may do. The point is though, that those darts do not perform very well on a pig.
00:11:57
Speaker
They're not the kinds of darts that you would want to hunt a pig with, just like the arrows were printed pretty light for a bison, although you could actually kill a bison with one of those if you didn't hit a rib. And as a result, those samples of weapons of lightweight arrows, of those lightweight basket maker darts, unsurprisingly, they didn't perform that well. They didn't penetrate very deeply. Basket maker people were never hunting hogs. This is a fact.
00:12:26
Speaker
because hogs did not live in the Southwest. They were probably hunting mountain sheep, desert mountain, big corn mountain sheep for the majority of the bigger game they were hunting. They were also apparently killing each other with them and they were hunting rabbits. And they may have been hunting animals as big as elk and occasionally they may have been hunting bison. But the issue here is that the weapons system isn't necessarily matched to the prey species
00:12:55
Speaker
they were shooting them into, and they weren't supposed to be. We were testing, this is my point, the hypothesis was, you know, basket maker weapon systems could not kill a hog, or basket maker weapon systems could not kill a bison. Both of those are, what we found out was like, if they hit ribs, you're done. That animal's gone. If they have a really sharp point on there, and you land them just right, you could kill an animal like a hog or a bison.
00:13:26
Speaker
But this affects the penetration depth. So if you're just going to get mean penetration depths from those experiments, because we used a lot of those types of darts, you're going to end up with a low mean penetration depth. If on the other hand, you did an experiment where you were throwing big, heavy darts at a goat,
00:13:48
Speaker
We, Donnie launched a six foot dart entirely through a goat. That was so epic. I mean, it, yeah, I was there. It got very icky because it went through intestines. Yeah, it was gross. I do not recommend that at all. And I'm done testing goats, but it hit right behind the ribs and it just like the whole dart just launched through that goat. And if that was all you were testing on that kind of animal, your penetration depth would be way, way higher.
00:14:17
Speaker
So what you're asking and the kinds of iterations of weapons that you're using is really important in these experiments. And it's going to dramatically change the experimental results. Because a big thing they're talking about is they have that histogram under that table saying that this is where Clovis points fall based on accumulation of all this sort of data. But you're saying there's no contextualizing it into
00:14:46
Speaker
why they're firing? Are they all testing penetration, or are they asking different questions? I think that's where it starts their argument, is that Clovis points don't really penetrate that well based on all this reported data. But like you're saying, there's no contextualizing. You don't know enough about the atlatls or the darts or anything like that to really feel comfortable asking that question.
00:15:13
Speaker
Well, and they mention, you know, on page 8, you know, quote, there are documented experimental instances of full-size darts penetrating all the way through pig, bison, or caribou carcasses. But these individual instances are anomalies, not frequent, or even semi-regular occurrences. Now, that's, I don't, based on my experiments being Devin's tanto in a lot of these
00:15:36
Speaker
cases. It's like I've seen it every time we've done one of these experiments, a dart has gone through, if not all the way through a carcass. I put one through a bison. You can see that on YouTube. Donnie put that one through a bison and that's on the same YouTube video. Yeah, Carlton, you got like almost a meter of penetration through a bison.
00:15:54
Speaker
And because it went in between ribs, and going back to what you said earlier, I threw a dart, it hit the ribcage, it was an obsidian point, and it exploded like a frag grenade with like, not even a millimeter of penetration. It hit something hard and exploded. And so that issue of contextualizing these studies, it's important when making claims like this, because they have a lot of studies presented.
00:16:23
Speaker
I would highly recommend, you know, everyone actually read the studies that they talk about because this is, it's interesting how the data is being presented. And I don't know if, I highly doubt it's meant to be nefarious. And we're speaking of this because like, Devin is actively quoted in all this. Our podcast host is actively quoted in this. And we've all engaged in these studies. Like we're coming at this from a lens of, unlike some of the other things we've critiqued, we actually kind of know what we're talking about.
00:16:52
Speaker
Yeah, this isn't the hope oil or the revolutionary war. Like, we get this. Like, this is like stuff we do this in. My proudest moment is putting that dart through a, clean through a bias and like, don't take that away from me. It looks like we're clean through this segment though. And we will be right back with...
00:17:10
Speaker
episode 112 of A Life in Ruins Podcast. Welcome back to episode 112 of A Life in Ruins Podcast. We are here with Dr. Devin Pettigrew and we wanted to start off this segment of the podcast really focusing on the experiment they did. So we kind of characterized
00:17:30
Speaker
and talked about how they're summarizing other people's experiments and using their data to kind of at least start asking this question if Clovis points are very effective at penetrating things. But there
Alternative Testing Methods and Forensic Insights
00:17:44
Speaker
obviously is two parts to this. So, David, do you mind explaining, you know, kind of what they did for their experiment to kind of also test this efficiency of Clovis points? Sure. Yeah. Basically, they have a set up there in their lab that they use for
00:18:00
Speaker
to ask a lot of different questions, to perform a lot of different experiments. So the specifics of their setup is they have a 29-pound draw compound bow, and it's mounted on a mechanism that will shoot it consistently called a spot hog hooter shooter, I believe.
00:18:25
Speaker
That's what it's called. Yeah. Yeah. That's the name of it. I mean, that's, yeah, it's a product that that's, and that they talked about it in their papers. I think it's funny anyway, but that's, but the nice thing about that is like, it's as repeatable as you're going to get. One of the problems we have doing these controlled experiments is there to meet this, we're trying to meet this like mythical scientific, you know, ideal of having a repeatable experiment.
00:18:51
Speaker
And no experiment is actually perfectly repeatable just because there are all these subtle differences that occur and you can never do it exactly the same way every time. But for this set, you can go by the same bone, you can go by the same thing that they're using.
00:19:09
Speaker
That is nice and a smart approach. What was the draw strength on the bow that they used? 29 pounds. What's the recommended pound strength for hunting elk in Colorado? They actually just removed the recommended poundage, but I think most compound bow hunters would tell you at least
00:19:30
Speaker
Well, most traditional bow hunters would tell you at least 55 pounds of draw. And I think most compound bow hunters are going to be using something more like 70, 80 pounds of draw. Yeah. And why is that important? Well, because it results in a different arrow speed. The poundage of bow is, it gives you a rough indicator of the arrow speed. So people are going to say, you know, you need a hunt with at least a 55 pound draw bow.
00:19:57
Speaker
That could result in different arrow speeds depending on the specific material of the bow and the design of it, whatever, yada yada. But the goal is to get enough speed on an arrow with enough weight and an efficient enough armature on it that it's going to penetrate the animal that you're after and kill that animal. And you, as an experienced and successful hunter, what would you use a 28-pound bow for hunting?
00:20:26
Speaker
Well, a 29 pound compound bow, you could probably feasibly go out and hunt like small deer sized animals with that. If you have really efficient broad heads on there, but obviously not an elephant. And, uh, yeah. And I think probably there you'd run into a lot of hunters that would tell you to use a heavier drop O as well, even for running like little deer.
00:20:52
Speaker
Right. And even for ethical reasons, hunters want to be able to dispatch and harvest animals with the least amount of pain for an animal and use a lower draw strength that animal could suffer. Correct. Yeah. You're trying to get pass-through shots. That animal needs to drop as quickly as possible, both for an ethical reason and so you can actually retrieve that animal. Are there any studies of maybe parts of prehistoric bows and their theoretical draw weights they would have as part of that?
00:21:22
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, and they range just like modern ethnographic or more recent ethnographic bows. They range from the 40, 45 pound range up to 70, 80 pounds.
00:21:36
Speaker
So yeah, mostly what you're looking at there are replicas of artifacts. You replicate it because you obviously can't draw like a thousand year old bow. You replicate it and then test the poundage. So you're hoping to, your replica is close enough to tell you how that bow performed. Fair enough. And so they're, they're in a lab that have a rig set up to fire a bow from the same position to try to control the experiment as much as possible. It has a draw strength of 29 pounds. What else is going on here?
00:22:05
Speaker
And they're shooting it into clay. I can't remember the specific distance, but it's pretty close, something like five meters. And their arrow weighed about 72 grams. And they're shooting these, like I said, these ground stone points into pottery clay. And I did mention that they tried to validate it. They did an experiment where they had basically the exact same setup.
00:22:31
Speaker
And they took store-bought meat at just like these, these beef roasts and like lined them up and shot those ground stone points through the meat and through the clay. And they got similar penetration. However, they also shot an arrow with a regular pointy field point on it. So just around a point that you would shoot for target. And that penetrated deeper into the clay.
00:22:58
Speaker
than into the meat. And we're also concerned here about how sharp their stone point actually was because, like I said, I wasn't napped. It was ground to shape on lapidary equipment to, I think, at least 60 grit lapidary equipment, which is like a really rough grit, potentially as high as 200 grit. But I recently heard a podcast with Ed Ashby, who's at Bohander saying,
00:23:25
Speaker
You could ground a broadhead with 60,000 grit, and that makes it pretty sharp, but not as sharp as if you just drop it on leather, so 200 grit. I don't know. The point is we don't know how they compare in terms of their sharpness to a napped edge. And if they're a sharp, it might penetrate better into meat.
00:23:49
Speaker
Okay. So what's the issue with using clay and, and, you know, as an extension of that, like, are there also issues using ballistics gel, which is another common target material? Yeah. And there's a, there are quite a few of the experiments they put in their table use ballistic pelting. Uh, so this is something I looked at really closely and there was a past experiment that did shoot crossbow bolts and arrows into ballistic soap.
00:24:19
Speaker
which is used commonly in Europe, ballistics gelatin and fresh pig carcasses. And basically there's two really big issues with the ballistics gelatin. The first being that in this experiment, they, just like in the Aaron, actually the lead author is Key, Key, Aaron and others experiment shooting ground stone points in the clay and in the meat, as well as field points in the clay and in the meat.
00:24:45
Speaker
In this experiment, they found that field points penetrate deeper into those target cimulants. The field point penetrates deeper into ballistic soap, deeper into gelatin, and a lot more shallowly into the pig carcasses. So it would penetrate like 40% as deeply or less deeply into the actual carcasses than it would into ballistic gelatin.
00:25:10
Speaker
When they shot broadheads into those targets, they got the opposite results so that the broadheads actually penetrate a lot more deeply through the pink archesis than into ballistics gelatin or ballistic soap. And so what that tells us is that those two target simulates are not scalable to flesh.
00:25:31
Speaker
There's supposed to be flesh stimulants, meaning that they scale to flesh. So this brings up the second problem, which is that firearms research has for years studied target stimulants and found one that works for bullets. That being widely accepted, 10% ordinance, collagen-based ballistics gelatin. So basically to make that,
00:25:57
Speaker
You're going to take a pig or cows when you butcher them. You're going to take parts of those animals that, you know, you don't save for the grocery store. Tenons, bones, hide. Those get processed really extensively in a factory with a lot of pipes and hot water, acid extraction. And you end up with like pure collagen protein. That's what we're using for the gel.
00:26:24
Speaker
but you have to use the right amount of it. It's not that you can just, it's not that there's just like a thing out there called collagen
Target Materials and Projectile Penetration
00:26:29
Speaker
protein and it's like flush. You have to mix it just right. So you get 10% of that mixed with distilled water. You mix it all up just right following all the proper protocols. You cool it just right in there, you know, just to the right temperature, which is four degrees Celsius, pull that out. And then you have to calibrate it.
00:26:50
Speaker
and there's a protocol for calibrating it. Once you've done that, then you can actually test it. And then you're going to get similar penetration depth for bullets into that material as in the pig flush, pig muscle, right? That's what I mean by flushes, muscle plus like some gristle and stuff in there, flush. So that material has been determined to be scalable. What we're seeing basically is that
00:27:16
Speaker
Ballistics gelatin, even though it works for bullets, bullets are very different from arrows and arrows travel at much lower velocities. They have like a sharp cutting edge. We expect the sharpness to do something. So those materials aren't scalable for the projectiles we're trying to study. And just to summarize the results quickly, I've got Doug and I have a paper that will be available as a preprint, at least when this
00:27:44
Speaker
podcast though, but I can summarize quickly. We shot broad heads with the same size, same shape, same weight, one very sharp, one extremely dull into ballistics gelatin. This was actually a synthetic version of ballistics gelatin and in the pottery clay. And in both instances, there's no difference in the penetration depth.
00:28:06
Speaker
We also shot arrows with broadheads, field points, so these are target points, and then blunt points. Unsurprisingly, the blunt point bounces off them with 6 gelatin. However, the blunt point penetrated about 50 centimeters into the clay target, whereas the broadhead penetrated about 17 centimeters into the clay target.
00:28:28
Speaker
the same broadhead on the same arrow at the same velocity, penetrated almost 80 centimeters through a bison. So it's another example of how these two target materials aren't telling us what we think they are. You know, archaeologists did not, we've never gone through the extensive experimental regime. All of the research that we need to do to ensure that these target media are scalable, that they are showing us what
00:28:56
Speaker
We presume them to be showing us. We've never done that. Compare our work to firearm terminal ballisticians and it's just like, I don't know, we're kids playing in the sandboxes. With a BB gun.
00:29:12
Speaker
She's completely outclassed, right? And I think that's a larger issue in the field of professional archeology where we are kind of these copycat scientists where we took this idea of what is science without really testing. I mean, part of being an archeologist and anthropologist is we rely on other folks' expertise and we try to apply it to our own work. And clearly what you're saying is that it's not necessarily analogous that we need to actually look at like, yes, there's a ballistics gelatin that works specifically for firearms,
00:29:43
Speaker
And we haven't tested that applicability to weapons that humans have used throughout the course of time prior to firearms, right? Yeah. Which, I mean, that's alarming, right? We have a whole table in this paper that uses all these different materials. And what you're saying is like, actually using carcasses is the best analogy, because the clay and the ballistics gel, there's so much variability in making ballistics gel.
00:30:11
Speaker
Yeah. We never talk about that. We just say we have what sticks shelter.
00:30:17
Speaker
So we just need the SCAs to purchase a bison farm specifically for experimental purposes, right? Yes. But there's also, there's no, not saying that we couldn't find a ballistics gel mix alternative that works for arrows and whatnot. It's just, we haven't done the research deep into, we haven't done the, we haven't done the bullet research essentially where people are doing the,
00:30:45
Speaker
Right. So you won't find ballistics gelatin though. I think this is part of the point is just, it's the nature of the material. Ballistics gelatin and clay, whatever formula you find of those materials, isn't going to work. And clay is extremely problematic as well, because it's very hard to control how it's formulated. When you go buy clay, when I went and bought clay to test.
00:31:09
Speaker
They're like, which kind do you want? We have over 30 different varieties and they're all different. And I'm thinking, okay, in the original paper, they only said we had a low fire pottery clay. You know, they're not really going into any depth and about what those clays are made of and they can't because the potter isn't going to tell you specifically what goes into that clay. It's like a recipe for, you know, it's like grandma's recipe. You got to protect that recipe. So.
00:31:37
Speaker
So it's impossible to repeat it. Yeah. So, but those materials aren't going to work. We got to find something different. And, uh, what I proposed, what I looked at was, uh, forensic studies of knife, knife stabbings. For instance, the sister pretty deeply interested in like how humans murder each other with various things, including knives.
00:31:58
Speaker
And they've tested that because it's actually useful to know like how efficient is this knife versus this knife? Because you may be looking at a criminal case where you've got, you know, two possible murderers. One's a, you know, five foot tall petite female and the other's like a six foot tall dude. And based on like the angle of stabbing and the force necessary, that could be important. But how they test those knives
00:32:26
Speaker
is they use skin stimulants because skin is the most resistive soft tissue on the body. So, and it's the first barrier you have to penetrate. It's understandable. Skin is what protects us or skin protects us from the outside world. And it protects us from projectiles and things like that. First, you got to get through skin and you have to get through clothing. So they're testing the efficiency with which knives penetrate through skin. And then that gives them a way to compare different knife designs.
00:32:54
Speaker
And that's essentially what we're trying to do in this controlled experiments is compare these different designs a lot of times. What these folks are trying to do is look at overall penetration depth. The problem here is that we want to know how analogous this experiment is, right? We're trying to know how these points and these weapons that the points are attached to would perform killing mammoths. So then we need to account for
00:33:22
Speaker
the thickness and resistivity of the skin of the mammoth, the muscle underlying it, how deep is the body cavity, all these factors that are particular to mammoths. So that's the kind of target, unfortunately. We need a target that tells us more about what mammoths are like. A reindeer is different. And a dog, there were some early experiments on dogs. They were dead. Everybody's going to be upset about that.
00:33:50
Speaker
All these animals were dead that were used in the CARX experiments, but none of them in the table are elephants or mammoths. So if they bring back mammoths and they can breed them.
00:34:04
Speaker
I don't know if they can bring back mammoths or get them semi out of extinction with something like that, you'd be interested in participating. Oh my God. Yeah, but the media fallout would be, or it is, can you imagine? I mean, even though it was dead beforehand, people just don't like this stuff, let's be honest. That's part of the issue we're running into is people don't like
00:34:31
Speaker
You have an animal that's dead. Even if you're going to eat it afterwards, people don't like you.
00:34:36
Speaker
Right? So based on the design of this experiment, the low poundage of the bow, typical to what would be recommended for hunting something big, what we consider big game today, which is elk, which is still much smaller than an elephant, which is not necessarily analogous to a mammoth. And the kind of target that they used, would you, based on your professional opinion, you know, would you, do you think that these, the results they came up with are accurate?
00:35:06
Speaker
yeah or meaningful or meaningful yeah no and again let's think about the target media if you use synthetic lipsticks gelatin like I did you're going to get very shallow penetration and in fact there's they they cite one of my favorite
00:35:25
Speaker
experiments article by Wood and Fitzhugh where they shot different kinds of points into a reindeer and then into synthetic ballistic Shelton.
Energy Requirements for Hunting with Atlatl Darts
00:35:34
Speaker
I find that their experiment really useful, but they calculated, they had three different point types, obsidian bone with an edge and then bone with obsidian glued along the edge.
00:35:49
Speaker
And the points that penetrated the absolute best were the obsidian, the napped obsidian points to the reindeer. And the points that penetrated the absolute worst were the napped obsidian points in the ballistics shelter. So what we need to do is take out, if we want to know how those points penetrate, well, perform against reindeer at the given values of kinetic energy momentum, we need to first remove all those shots with ballistics shelter.
00:36:15
Speaker
Okay, that material may tell us something about something. I don't know what at this point. So there's that problem and this, you know, problem carries over to clay. And then in terms of the lightweight bow, Carl, you were mentioning, they shot a light poundage or a low weight dart, an arrow basically that mimics like a really small out little dart that weighed about 72 grams.
00:36:43
Speaker
The really small basket maker darts I was talking about at the first that we threw at the pig, those weigh about 90 grams or so. So even when I would consider a really small at-le-le dart, their arrow was lighter than that, but they did get it to at-le-le dart velocities. The result was that it carried about 35 joules of energy. And there was another extremely useful article
00:37:10
Speaker
compiled by Tomka, Steve Tomka, about the endurance of at-level and dark weaponry after the bone. He compiled all these recommended values of momentum in kinetic energy for hunting animals of different size. The lowest kinetic energy you want for an animal as big as a bison or bigger is 88 joules of energy. They were
00:37:32
Speaker
They had an arrow of about 35 joules of energy penetrating into clay. I think the result is that we just don't know what those results mean, right? We don't know how to use them. Fair enough. And on that note, we do know we need to close out the segment. So we'll be right back with episode 112 with Dr. Devin Pettigrew right after these messages. Welcome back to episode 112 of the Life in Ruins podcast. We're going to talk this segment about joules and mountains. So looking at you, Carlton.
00:38:02
Speaker
Hey man, I think David's the one going to the mountains. I know it is. I'm trying to flip it up David. He's doing some other sort of lizard based research up there in the mountains. But we wanted to talk about
00:38:19
Speaker
continue this conversation and what you're going to do forward on what you're kind of studying now. So do you mind? Because specifically we just ended that last time we're talking about the required jewels, which is a measurement of energy needed to penetrate at least big game like bison and that they were only able to produce something in the thirties range, which what can we kill with? But like you specifically brought us up to the mountains to test
00:38:48
Speaker
Yeah. How much, how much jewels I, how do I word this? Like we, we jewels of energy, jewels of energy that all of us could produce by throwing darts at a, at a target. And so please walk our listeners through why we did it. What did we come up with and who's the champion jeweler? Sure. Yeah. I guess to start off, there was the bison experiment. We've already talked about that.
00:39:14
Speaker
And we got up to about a hundred joules of energy. And that was Donny Dust throwing an ash dart at a bison. Fortunately, that dart was not that well-designed. It was like really flexible in the front. And so it didn't penetrate that well. So bison two is coming and I've got some better well-designed heavy darts. But this all kind of plays back into the questions that I was trying to ask up in the mountains, which is, you know, what can we think of as like a lower range?
00:39:44
Speaker
of energy that you can hit with in that level, or that you can get to within that level. And can we get above that recommended range for hunting elephants? And so I designed a series of darts, including some of the ones that we're going to use on Bison 2, some heavy darts, some really well-made ones with like... Was that one really heavy? Well, the one was pretty heavy, yeah. The darts ranged from about 100
00:40:12
Speaker
grams, 100 grams, 200 grams in between two and 300. I don't think we quite, we may have hit 300 on that third one. And then an over 400 gram dart, like a 430 gram dart. So that's a big heavy dart. I had to use my other hand when throwing it to like lift it in the air before I threw it because I couldn't throw it regularly. Like that was ridiculous.
00:40:39
Speaker
That was really interesting being, so I was on most of the time I was like, um, on the side of it near the target, kind of helping retrieve the darts and watching all the flight patterns. And that one, it was just like, cause you obviously have the, is it spline? Is that what it's called where it's called the spine? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it didn't do like that wiggling at all. It was just like, you know, there wasn't like that, like, uh, kind of
00:41:06
Speaker
in profile. It was interesting to watch. Right, by spying, we're talking about the flexure of the dart shaft. Dart shafts have to be flexible to maintain straight flight when you throw them. Because you're not just taking the butt into the dart and pushing it perfectly in line. With its length, your arm is kind of arching up and falling. So just like an arrow has to be flexible, it has to be flexible.
00:41:34
Speaker
I did look at ethnographic examples of, of dart weights and they range up above actually 400 grams for Australian native Australian darts. Some of those apparently even go above 600. So we weren't even throwing like as heavy as, as you could. But, but one of the points here is that with darts, if you want to get more energy, you have to go heavier.
00:42:02
Speaker
And actually this is true of human throwing in general. There was a simple experiment carried out in the 70s where they took a bunch of different people and had them all throw balls of like 10 different weights.
00:42:15
Speaker
And the lighter balls typically flew faster, but the heavier ones always carried more energy. And of course it also depended on the strength and skill of the throw. So that the highest energy was achieved with, you know, the most skillful, not just like, it's about, throwing is about finesse too. It's not just like, all muscle, the most skillful and the strongest throwers and the heaviest balls. So we're trying to do the same thing with that.
00:42:45
Speaker
What energy can we get to? So I recruited you guys, cause I want to get a range of different people throwing these things and, uh, and got Donny up there as well. And through these darts and we hit about 124 joules of energy. And who threw that one? That was Donny. And who was the second highest? Uh, Carlton, I think he may have hit one 17. Yes.
00:43:14
Speaker
I was going to say, if you just threw a David out there, that would have been a laugh. It was David. Sorry, Carlton. We're throwing, part of the problem here is we're throwing in front of cameras and the dart, I had a camera looking from behind and then you had to throw it across this backdrop in front of this other camera and there's markings on the dart.
00:43:39
Speaker
So from behind, I'm observing to make sure that the darts are staying pretty straight because if they're like way skewed in flight, it's going to affect the readings because you actually have a scale on the dart itself. It's the only way to do it. You have to calibrate that video to the frame rate of the video in a scale that's in the path of the thing that you're tracking. And the only way to do that consistently is have the scale in the dart shaft itself.
00:44:07
Speaker
and have the points on the dark shaft. So I'm making sure they're flying straight and they have to go in front of that camera. And David just kept like lobbing that big heavy one over the backdrop. But I caught one of him throwing that thing in front of the camera and it was, he got some pretty impressive energy with it too. So we all kind of did. I mean, we all, we all were able to hit like pretty close to the recommended energy
00:44:33
Speaker
for an elephant. And one thing we should be clear about is that these are the recommendations for modern hunters.
00:44:41
Speaker
who may have different, you know, goals or how do you say it, aspirations, I guess, in terms of like how your projectiles can perform. Frequently we're after like complete pass through shots. And what I noticed on the bison was that you definitely didn't have to hit those recommended jewels to be weaseled to the bison. If you wanted your projectile to consistently be able to bust through ribs,
00:45:06
Speaker
and penetrate through, it's a good idea to have those high jewels. So on an elephant, I think it's possible that there's more leeway than what we're anticipating.
00:45:19
Speaker
especially when you have sharp armatures, because if you have really sharp armatures, they're able to cut through even that thick hide. And then once you get through the hide and through the muscle tissue underlying it, if you're in between ribs or your projectile is skipping around ribs, you get into the body cavity, the organs are actually way less resistant.
00:45:39
Speaker
So once you get through that rib, the skin, if your projectile is well-designed, and it doesn't have big bumps along the shaft and stuff, it's going to slide right on through. So yeah, I think we may be underestimating these things' ability to penetrate through an alpha.
00:45:57
Speaker
Well, also, I think it's important to note, this whole thing happened with my graduation party. We were able to, it just so happened, David and Connor and others were in town and you were able to round up all these at-lateral throws who haven't thrown an at-lateral in quite some time and throwing darts we didn't practice with for the first time and also changing the weights, which changes the mechanism of how you throw them. And we were able to in this really
00:46:23
Speaker
quickly put together experiment that was, I mean, not, but you know, we've done, you've done this experiment before. We, we knew the mechanics. It was just like, we were able to round up a posse really quick and illustrate, you know, the point of this wasn't to record penetration depths. That's the point of a Bison experiment too. But we're able to initially show that we're able to throw with amateur level at-loud throwers, dart throwers, that we can hit the necessarily jewels required to take down a modern elephant.
00:46:53
Speaker
So that's different than like if we were habitually using the atlatls, we had our favorite dart. It's our equipment. Like we're all using Devon's equipment that we're not necessarily familiar with and we're able to do it. And so, you know, next step is Bison experiment take two where we're using the same darts that we used to do with the jewel to record jewels.
00:47:14
Speaker
And in that experiment, right, like you had already mentioned in the first one that we had done, which we talked about on this podcast up in Montana, there's a YouTube video about it, you'll be able to record jewels. Donnie was able to get to over a hundred with darts that weren't that weight that you had just explained. If you want more jewels, you need heavier darts. And so this next experiment, so it's fully funded, like it's green, go ahead to do it.
00:47:37
Speaker
No, not quite yet. So that's interesting. I tried to crowdfund it because granting agencies don't like to give you money to experiment on a dead animal. Did you apply to the Colorado Council Professional Archaeologists Scholarship?
00:47:53
Speaker
There's one that's specifically for experimental stuff. I won that one a while back, yeah. Fair. And I've got this one used for my controlled experiments. Gotcha. But when this Bison experiment take two happens, we'll use the DARTs and we're going to specifically target some of the questions that were brought forth by Aaron et al.
00:48:12
Speaker
to test them and be like, well, this is what we found when using it under conditions with an animal carcass. These are the darts we're using, these are the tips, these are the throwers, these are the atlatls, because your first bison experiment that I will attest to to my dying day was highly controlled in the manner of the technicality of it. The fact that every dart was numbered, every point was numbered, the throwers, the atlatls, the penetration deaths,
00:48:36
Speaker
your data collection was significant that I'm not seeing when I read these papers, when you share them, I don't see that same. I just don't see the same.
Implications for Understanding Ancient Hunting Techniques
00:48:48
Speaker
And so, I mean, granted they have supplementary appendixes that I, you know, it's just interesting. I'm really excited to hope to take part in part two because it's like, this is a really interesting question.
00:48:59
Speaker
And our advisor during your graduation mention, he put your research in this analogy of, Devin's research is a small window on this giant glass mosaic. But when you actually look through that window, the view that you can see in terms of
00:49:17
Speaker
the questions that you're asking and answering expand your perspective that cover other windows viewpoints, if that makes sense. It seems like a small niche, but what you're able to get out of it has drastic consequences for what we're able to see in the archaeological record as it pertains to subsistence strategies, which for the majority of our behavior on this planet,
00:49:40
Speaker
Subsistence is like priority number one, like reproducings priority number two, right? And so you're answering these questions that have significant consequences for how we understand human behavior for the majority of humans history on this planet over a hundred thousand years as hunter-gatherers. Yeah, and we're going to get.
00:49:59
Speaker
We will get penetration deaths. Those will be meaningful. But let's think about the question. I mean, the question is, can you kill an elephant or can you kill a mammoth with an apple on tart? And let's think about the critique because we've already talked about their controlled experiment and what that actually tells you. We've talked some about the other experiments they've compiled and the same way that a goat is not an elephant.
00:50:29
Speaker
a bison isn't either. So we need to think, and I do think that the controlled experiments are extremely useful. It's really useful to compare results of a controlled lab experiment with the kind of naturalistic experiment that we're trying to do with the bison. One way to approach this is to look at what's the skin like on a mammoth? What's the resistivity of that? And can we reproduce that in some way?
00:50:56
Speaker
And then you could actually, you know, reasonably approach this question in a lab, because if you got, if you can, with a dart, you know, if we can say, you can carry, you can throw a dart with up to, you know, 140 joules or something like that, a well-designed one. And we're able to shoot that in a lab type setting, and it goes, you know, it's punched straight through a simulate that's supposed to mimic a, a mammoth.
00:51:25
Speaker
skin. That's much, that's actually something you can use. So even if we can't do an experiment on an elephant, it's going to be challenging for those, those media reasons. I, I mentioned people really, really like elephants even after they're dead, but we don't have many of them. That's another point. And elephants also are different from mammoths. And this, this paper actually, if you want to dig into like the anatomy
00:51:54
Speaker
of mammoths, they do a great job talking about the anatomy and nailing down those resources. So it's a good review of that topic. Well, to close this out real quick, I mean, for those that are listeners that are in archaeology, we do find Clovis points with mammoth carcasses. So how does this paper briefly describe why do we find Clovis points with mammoths?
00:52:21
Speaker
Well, there's some issues here where maybe that we're finding close points with mammoths because they punched through past ribs. Frison said that the ribs were like rounded in the center more where the lungs are. And that's actually what you would target because it's more likely to hit the rib and skip around it. In this paper, they talk about the quote unquote picket fence of ribs. Like the way they present the whole argument is
00:52:46
Speaker
It seems kind of like they're really, they're really trying to push a view, but, uh, why is it that we're finding these close points with these big animals? Why do they have, you know, different impact? Frag shooters and that sort of thing.
00:53:00
Speaker
It is that we find Clovis points with impact fractures. They are projectiles. There is kind of a movement now in archaeology, in paleontine archaeology, to say, well, these weren't actually that effective. Often, these weren't even projectiles. These were actually knives. And so maybe they're finding dead
00:53:21
Speaker
mammoths and scavenging them. Read a book called Hunting Caribou, subsistence hunting on the edge of the boreal forest, to get an idea about the usefulness of scavenging dead animals out on the landscape that you find all the time.
00:53:34
Speaker
Well, Donnie did ask us to go up to the woods with him up in the mountains and wear loincloths. And when we asked him about food, he said, it's okay. We'll just scare a couple of cats. Meaning we're just going to run at mountain lions away from their deer kills. I wasn't sold on that, on his optimism and like excitement to like, I'm going to take all these kids up. We're just to go boogie, woogie with mountain lions. I never once ran into a mountain lion with a deer like, Oh,
00:54:01
Speaker
Hi, sorry to interrupt your meal. Never happened to me once. I don't know. Maybe it happens to Johnny all the time. But again, we want to think about the target. This is a big-ass animal, right? And it had to be hard to kill these things. And so there must have been, even if you were going after them regularly, you know, hunting them on a regular basis, there must have been a greater chance that you're going to lose that projectile in the body of that animal. I mean, that's a big, huge animal. How would you like to gut a mammoth?
00:54:30
Speaker
No, dude. I had my fill with the bison. That was a long day. Yeah. Well, I mean, I can gut a deer. Like you just roll your sleeve up and you stick your whole arm up there, like to your shoulder and pull out the guts. With the bison, it's a different deal. I can't imagine trying to gut a man. So.
00:54:48
Speaker
So there's probably a greater likelihood that you're going to be losing those projectiles in the bodies of those animals, either because they come off in the inside and you're never going to find them, or because the animal escapes.
00:55:02
Speaker
So that's worth thinking about. When we're finding around bison kills, lots of broken points, lots of dead animals. Bison just dying left to right because they drum them into their royals and that sort of thing. Their weapons were affected and they were dropping them on the spot. And in a lot of cases, it seems they were retrieving their projectiles and then deciding if they wanted to rework them and keep them or throw them away if they're impacted after that.
00:55:28
Speaker
So that can all play into the differences in impact damage and why we're finding those more frequently around elephants. But those are just some ideas to explore and think about.
Resources and Recommendations for Weapon Technology Enthusiasts
00:55:42
Speaker
Thank you so much for coming on and chatting with us again. I love picking your brain or hearing about all this stuff because it's very interesting and we're really excited to see where this stuff goes in the future. I will volunteer the name for the second one. We're going to call it Ralphie. Go CSU.
00:56:02
Speaker
That's funny. We got a survey today asking to see if students would want to be named the next Ralphie. Yeah, my first experiment was on a hog. That was for University of Arkansas. Our mascot is a hog. And then my dissertation was on above the eggs. So you got to go to a university that has a mammoth as a...
00:56:25
Speaker
Well, Devin, before we end the show, what are a couple sources, books, articles, videos that you would recommend for anyone interested in ancient weapon technology? We already have Aaron at all 2021, hunting caribou, subsistence hunting along the northern edge of the boreal forest. And then we'll put a couple of citations of your work and Dr. Whitaker's work. And for anyone listening, if you really go through Aaron at all, that's actually a really good
00:56:48
Speaker
list of sources that do all this. So if you're interested, definitely go through their citations and, and read them, like, you know, actually read them. But what else, what else you got for us, Devin? Well, I think, uh, in terms of hunting, of course there's, there's George Frison's, uh, seminal work, which is survival by hunting. Um, I can't recommend the survival by hunting or a honey caribou book enough. I really love that. And it's hard to think of any that are like really focused in on the topic of, of ancient
00:57:18
Speaker
hunting with ancient weapons. But for bows and arrows, the traditional Bowyer's Bibles, those are really good resources. One thing to consider is that if you're interested in this stuff, especially if you're an archaeologist and you're interested in studying it, you should really try it. There's a number of different resources on how to do that. And so don't look at works like traditional Bowyer's Bibles or Jim Hamm's book.
00:57:48
Speaker
on Native American bows and arrows. Don't look at those and think, ah, those aren't, you know, by some professor, I'm not gonna read those. They're chock-full of useful information. You can, you know, look at them with a critical eye just as you do academic work and pull what's useful out of them. But actually using those resources to try out the weapons and then go hunting, just like Frison said. You know, if you're an archaeologist and you study ancient hunters, you should really try to hunt some because it'll totally change your perspective.
00:58:17
Speaker
I'm not saying just use a bow and arrow or something like that. You can rifle hunt too.
Conclusion and Thanks
00:58:22
Speaker
It's very useful to get out there on the landscape, see how these animals behave, see how they respond to you, and just the whole process of finding them, butchering them, getting the meat, putting it in your freezer.
00:58:37
Speaker
There are elements of it that are really closely in August in the past, a lot of them that aren't, but it's just, it's a useful thing to do to really enhance your perspective of what this is like. Definitely. And so where can people find you and all your cool stuff that you do on social media? You can find me at ar.atl, atl on Instagram.
00:59:08
Speaker
and baskmakerautlot.com. Those are the two places I would recommend. Excellent. Always appreciate you coming on, man. So everyone, we just did Dr. Devin Pettigrew. You can find him on Instagram at ar.autlotl and his website, which is phenomenal, has a bunch of resources and also to make out laddles at baskmakerautlotl.com.
00:59:29
Speaker
the review. Rate, review, do the thing. I'm not gonna plead with you. I'm not gonna offer you free stickers. I'm gonna play the bad cop right now. Those two play a good cop and say, we'll give you free stuff. No, just give us a review. You listen to our crap, do it.
00:59:43
Speaker
And if you're listening to us on the All Shows feed, please, please, please consider following us on our individual page, Life in Ruins podcast. It helps us grow our channel and allows us data that we can give to sponsors and advertisers so we can keep funding this. So please, please, please listen to our show individually. And with that, we are out.
01:00:12
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. Well, everyone, it's your favorite time of the episode. If you ever make it this far, Connor, what is your joke for us this evening? So my significant other told me to pick up six cans of Sprite at the store. When I get home, I realized I picked seven up.
01:00:49
Speaker
Thanks, man. Alright, we're out.
01:01:03
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.