Transcript
Speaker: You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Speaker: Welcome to Life and Ruins Podcast, re -investigate the careers of those living life in ruins. I'm your host, Carlton Gover, joined by my co -host, Connor Jonnan and David Howe. Tonight, we are joined by previous guest, Devin Pettigrew, who appeared first on our show. He said 18 .2, all we are is Donnie dust in the wind. And then right afterwards, episode 19 of Bose and Hose, a conversation about prehistoric technology with Devin Pettigrew.
Speaker: I just had a conversation with them about the term for your story. Uh, anyways, Devin is now, uh, are you Dr. Devin now officially or not until you graduate in the winter? Yeah. So I still got a few hoops to jump through here. I have to do all the edits and turn it in, but yeah, pretty much. I mean, they said I was a doctor kind of cool. So you have a, you have a black belt in atlateral archeology now.
Speaker: I guess a master's a big black belt. You're like a fifth degree now. There you go. Yeah, purple. I don't know. You know, unlike many of our other guests, like we've kind of I mean, you your research itself with ballistic weapons has been on our YouTube channel. It's like the only content that we have on YouTube is just you with all your stuff.
Speaker: Yeah, spearing some poor animal. Yeah. Well, some dead animal. It's already dead. Make sure everybody knows that they're already dead. The ranchers put them down humanely. So we don't want PETA coming after us and throwing, no, throwing blood on our screens while we record or something. Yeah. No, these are all of the experiments have evolved animals that were raised for meat by ranchers, the ranchers kill them. And then we butcher them and eat them. So.
Speaker: You know, we preserve all of the meat and divvy depth amongst the experimenters. So Devin, this episode is about your dissertation. So what is, I guess now at this point, what was your research question that was driving this giant document of yours? Well, there was really a lot to it. And what I was really interested in is ancient hunting, you know, ancient hunting methods, ancient hunting tools.
Speaker: I had questions about the ballistics of ancient hunting weapons. That was the starting point. I did this series of experiments to study that. Then I started delving into what makes hunters successful in a variety of different contexts, both past and present. Of course, present is important because
Speaker: We can't see the past. We have to use the present and use modern people or recent historical people as analogues for the past. So I did the ballistic tests.
Speaker: And I did a survey of hunters in Iowa. That was a follow -up from a survey in the 70s to look at success rates between hunters using compound bows and traditional bows. Compound bows are like, they have wheels attached. Cams attach to the end of them. They're extremely efficient.
Speaker: Turns out they shoot arrows at over twice the velocity and twice the distance as traditional bow and arrows. The hunters are twice as successful with them. All that's very fascinating, you know, in the context of modern hunting, but it has implications for the past hunting too. And then finally I compared that data with, uh, evidence from ethnographic accounts of hunters and their success rates.
Speaker: which was fascinating. Those were the main drives and the realistic experiments that I did are useful for all sorts of things. You can really pull a lot out of those experiments. When you run that kind of experiment, you get just overwhelmed with data. And so I used it to look at the terminal ballistics.
Speaker: Okay, so you have, when you launch a projectile, the act of launching it is the internal ballistics, it's flight through atmosphere, it's the external ballistics. And then when it impacts the target and penetrates the target, that's the terminal ballistics. So I focused on that aspect of the results.
Speaker: Cool. So I know in other folks' dissertations, it's like the format is that you have three standalone articles that you write or essentially a book. Is yours going to be more of a book or are you doing kind of the article route? Yeah, I'm trying to pull a book out of this ultimately, but I did it in the article format. Okay. So come back around eventually and do a book, but I tried to do it as five
Speaker: seven chapters total, five of which are standalone articles. So I think at least four of those will be publishable articles, but they still have to go through the review and acceptance process and all the editing. So how many experiments did you perform? And were any of them done in association with your thesis research down in Arkansas?
Speaker: Yeah. So I started in Arkansas. My master's thesis was a realistic experiment. When I say realistic experiment, we're talking that the target is
Speaker: is sort of closer to the kinds of things that people were targeting in the past. So in this case, animal carcasses. And people actually using replicas of weapons. That's a realistic experiment. There's a lot of variability at play there. I did one of those on a domestic hog carcass. And I sort of tied that in with two experiments on goat carcasses, which Carlton helped me with. He was delighted to help me experiment on goats.
Speaker: because he really enjoyed the smell and the taste. And then a bison experiment, which Carlton also helped with.
Speaker: I think he was really, I heard he was really tolerant of these, of these, of these smells and you know, it was a good sport about it. You know, it was the one goat. It was the one goat. And we've discussed that several times. Like I think a listener hit us up some, that at some point it was on our discord channel. They were listening to episode 19 and the dude was like, I was just screaming at the, at the TV or whatever Carlton stopped talking about the goat, stopped talking about the goat. Cause I remember myself about to puke every time.
Speaker: Yeah, that got gross. It did because we had to clean those bones and they just left them out for like two days, like a whole weekend in a warm room.
Speaker: They did not smell good. That's not going to bode well. I got a goat well. What were we shooting up on that mountain top at Roosevelt National Forest? Was that goat or was that bison cow? I think we're just shooting at ribs. Like we bought beef ribs from the store, pork ribs from the store. Is that all that was? Okay. I wanted to do a goat experiment that weekend, but the weather just turned really crappy. So.
Speaker: We just ended up doing pork ribs, which, you know, people do that and you can say things about how stone tools break and that sort of thing. But having a, a cold rack of ribs, that's, you know, been, you know, taken out of an animal stored in a freezer probably doesn't have the skin on it. It's going to change the results and you can't get like penetration data, any kind of meaningful data like that from it. So, so there's only so much you can do with that kind of experiment.
Speaker: checks out. I do remember shooting it and I also remember you saying, Hey, bring your own at -lattle so we can get better data. Forgot my at -lattle. And then you gave me yours and the first shot. I missed it and broke the point. Yeah. Uh, but it was fun. We got to shoot it up on the mountain top. What was like the most meaningful thing in your thesis that you found that like you didn't expect to find your dissertation, I should say. So when you do the, the realistic experiment,
Speaker: That involved high -speed cameras that captured the impacts. So there's one filming from behind or near the thrower, and then one filming from the side that captures the velocity. And as I was going through these data and calculating the velocities, you do that by tracking points on the projectile shaft. And then you scale it to a scale that's on the shaft and to the speed of the video. And that allows you to calculate the velocity.
Speaker: I realized that if I kept tracking that point, I could actually calculate the deceleration as the projectile penetrated into the animal. And I started seeing that in most cases, it was going along, it would hit the skin, and there would just be a precipitous drop in the velocity. And then it would kind of level off.
Speaker: And then you could see it drop again when it hit the other side of the animal. So you're seeing deceleration as it penetrates through the body of the animal, hits bone and various other things. You can tie all that back to bone and where the projectile hit on the body. So what that gives you is a detailed look at the efficiency of these projectiles, these different stone armatures and the projectiles themselves
Speaker: And when I put that together and ran the statistical analysis, I actually could see that there was a big difference between the material types of the armatures. So armatures made of glassy materials, some of them were made of Brazilian agate, some of them obsidian.
Speaker: You know, all sorts of different things, not necessarily the same kinds of stone that people were using in North America, but all different kinds of materials. The finer grained ones were more efficient at punching through the skin and the skin is elastic. It's very tough. So what we're seeing is sharpness.
Speaker: And if you look at the archaeological record, archaeologists for some time have said there are exotic, quote unquote, exotic stone materials that people are trading for.
Speaker: And why are they trading for these? It must be about costly signaling, et cetera, et cetera. It turns out our advisor, mine and Carlton's advisor, Doug Bamford has written about this in terms of Clovis. They were going for these quote unquote exotic materials, specifically for their projectile armatures. And they were using rougher grain materials for their other tools.
Speaker: So it appears that they saw that these stones were more effective on the ends of projectiles. And I think that's, you know, that speaks to, we need to rethink our terms. I think exotic is not necessarily capturing it. Legit style versus function. That's kind of cool. Yeah. I mean, these are, you know, people are making functional decisions.
Speaker: That's cool. So how many different kinds of raw materials did you use? I mean, cause I've seen it like there, you used a breadth of different points, like even shaft weights, different shaft sizes used bows, arrows, different weights, different materials of that. And all of everything was numbered. Like you had,
Speaker: Yeah. Your data management was just like when we were doing these experiments, someone was always just on the clipboard, tying back, OK, which project number projectile point went to that numbered shaft, went to that number dart, went to which adelad on who was the thrower? Yeah. And all the specifics of the stone armatures. And on a lot of these, I did 3D analysis using photogrammetry and got a lot of dimensions that way that you can't capture just
Speaker: you know, with an old fashioned calipers or whatnot. I think in the analysis I just mentioned with the different material types, I think I narrowed that down to like eight, something like that for that specific analysis. But, you know, with this kind of experiment, there's always, so what we're differentiating between is control versus realistic.
Speaker: When you do a controlled experiment, you're trying to isolate a certain phenomenon, a phenomenon of interest. And in a realistic experiment, you're keeping most of the variability that you would find in a more realistic context in play. So that makes it really hard to isolate things.
Speaker: What causes a projectile to penetrate? Is it the cross -sectional area of the armature, the sharpness of it? You have to use these complex statistical methods to isolate these things, and it all becomes very challenging.
Speaker: When you have a lot of different variables, you have many different shafts, many different types of armatures because, you know, as we know, statistical analyses, they really benefit from large sample sizes. So you have, when you have a lot of different variability, it's hard to capture those large sample sizes for each group of projectile. So that's, that's a downfall of this kind of approach.
Speaker: But a benefit is that when archaeologists study the archaeological record, we're often making these kind of broad assumptions. We're looking at, you know, assemblages that represent a technology, we assume, or we're trying to differentiate between different technologies. Is it an outlet or is it a boat?
Speaker: What we often forget is that there's a lot of variability within these different technologies and how they were applied in the past. If you want to make inferences about inter -weapon variability, you need to run these kinds of analyses. I think rigor, people always complain about not having enough scientific rigor.
Speaker: You can do it, you can observe all these different variables, but this kind of experiment really requires rigor. Yeah, I feel like I've heard of most of the experimental stuff I hear of is controlled kind of work. I know David, David, you would consider yours controlled, where you're trying to isolate the projectile point size as part of that. And I think it hurts my brain to think about the realistic kind of stuff because there's, like you said, there's so many variables and you're just like,
Speaker: But, but parsing that out is, is super interesting and you get these interesting results like you, like you're showing. I think it's, it's awesome. So obviously like the thickness of skin matters is a, is a big factor in how effective these projectile points are. Could it be like, because clothes folks are hunting like mammoths and stuff like that, that it's even more important for them to use obsidian or other things like that.
Speaker: Yeah, obsidian is a very fragile material. It's glass, meaning that, well, it's actually a fluid material. It lacks a crystalline structure. So when obsidian projectiles hit bone, as Carlton found out, they just explode. So there's these different compromises people are making. But yeah, mammoths, Pleistocene proboscidians relative to even African elephants,
Speaker: They had a very robust structure, thick skin, very robust ribs. There's a famous archaeologist that we've already discussed him, I think, George Frison, did a series of experiments in Africa on cold African elephants. This is during a culling operation at a park. The elephants were getting overpopulated and they had to go in and reduce their population.
Speaker: They also butchered them. So he tagged along behind and experimented on the carcasses. And Frison was a huge, strong guy and he used really heavy darts, 400 grams. And I remember I was talking to him once at a conference and he leaned in.
Speaker: He's talking to me emphatically about these things. He said, people don't understand the power of these things. I could literally pin you to the wall with my elephant out loud. Like, yes, sir. Yes, sir. These weapons, they come in a lot of variation, as I discussed. And there are some big, heavy, powerful versions that
Speaker: I strongly suspect, you know, based on Frisid's results, even given the stronger bones and thicker skin of mammoths, that Clovis people could have been, you know, hunting those animals with this weapon. Well, we're going to go ahead and put a pin in this conversation and read right back with a segment two of episode 75. Welcome back to episode 75 of a life and ruins podcast. We're here with Dr. Devin Pettigrew.
Speaker: Marcus soon to be doctor, but all intents and purposes, he's a doctor. We ended up talking about Clovis in the last segment. I know half the audience listening also gets really excited when we talk about Clovis, just as I do. Part of my thesis was talking about like Clovis atlatls and Clovis bows or paleoindian in general. But do you have a general idea of what a Clovis like atlatl would have looked like or what kind of material they would have been using? Or you, you know, a lot about the actual
Speaker: weapon system itself and the different ones. I'll stop talking, but yeah, do you know? I have an idea. The closest we've been to, you know, definitive evidence of Clovis
Speaker: has come out of rivers in Florida where, you know, the context unfortunately isn't preserved, but among Pleistocene megafauna bones and what looks like paleo -Indian artifacts are what looks very much like alpineal hooks of mammoth ivory. And they happen to look a lot like
Speaker: middle archaic out little hooks. So once they're, you know, later in time that I've looked at in Texas, Missouri, Arkansas coming out of caves. And so what you probably had is something like
Speaker: A round shaft, they would have used probably just a peeled limb that was trimmed down that had an osseous hook, mammoth, ivory, or bone attached to the end of it. And the oldest outlet is from Nevada. The oldest complete outlet in North America is from Nevada. It's that kind of form. And it's about 5 ,000 to 6 ,000 years old.
Speaker: So if you look around, there's various indications that that form of outlet all has a really deep time depth in North America. Okay. That's really cool. Yeah. Especially if they had like a mammoth bone ivory or mammoth bone hooks on them. Cool. Yeah. During that experiment, we used everything from paleo ended up to
Speaker: late like pre -contact or even contact itself. What was there a difference between a lot of darts and arrows that you saw in terms of the velocities? Oh yeah, there's a big difference in their ballistics. And I mentioned earlier, people making compromises, you know, when you designed a projectile weapon for hunting, you're making a series of compromises. If you make it lightweight,
Speaker: It may not be as powerful, but it's easier to carry. It's easier to field. It may be stealthier and you can get in closer, or you can design big, heavy equipment for launching at large animals from a greater distance that maintains the momentum. And it's more efficient penetrating. In other words, it doesn't do as much work per length of penetration depth.
Speaker: So bows, they shoot a lighter projectile at a higher velocity. They have high kinetic energy and lower momentum relative to out little darts. Out little darts have higher momentum.
Speaker: lower kinetic energy. And when they penetrate, you get into the weeds here with the physics of this stuff. But basically, when a projectile hits a target, it's doing work on the target as a result of its kinetic energy. And different target materials will respond to that event differently.
Speaker: So for example, the Ottomans designed bows that were short, compact, and very powerful. And they shot light little arrows with them with small tips. The goal was to get close to the enemy and shoot an arrow at extreme velocity. Because at that weight of arrow, the bow is basically dry firing a string. That arrow really comes off that string at a high velocity. And as such, at a close range,
Speaker: they can penetrate metal armor, they can punch through steel armor because they have a lot of energy.
Speaker: punching through organic target, biological tissue, it may be more important to have more momentum to carry the projectiles through, because you really want to penetrate into the body cavity, especially if you're hunting a big animal. So those are the kinds of compromises that people are making when they're deciding how to design their projectiles. It appears that in recent, I can't say prehistory, what am I supposed to say, Carlton?
Speaker: Okay. Pre colonization. Who cares? In recent pre whites, um, we're using these actually kind of small compact bows and they were shooting lightweight arrows with small tips. So they were kind of doing the same thing, kind of thing that the Ottomans were doing, but that's what they were using for hunting. Yeah.
Speaker: you know, in other parts of the world, people used more massive equipment, more massive arrows and bows. Is that because the buffaloes were wearing a metal, metal armor? They had to, that's possible. I don't think we have any direct evidence, but okay. Just, just thought I'd ask. No. In any of the experiments did, whether that be the goat or bison or pig, did any arrows go through the carcass? Like all the way, like, or out the other. Yeah.
Speaker: Native American style pinch grip where you pinch the knock with your index and thumb and then you kind of assist with your ring finger and middle finger pulling the string back. So I build up a bulbous knock that was catching on the skin. So there were a few that probably would have gone all the way through. We also had darts go all the way through. Donnie dusts through that heavy ash dart
Speaker: Almost, yeah, it was close. Actually, a couple of the arrows, well, the arrows I was shooting, I like to use a,
Speaker: they went the entire length of the dart, 223 centimeters through the center of a goat. So that's what momentum can do for you. That dart was disgusting after it went all the way through. I do remember that. Like it was just covered in yachts.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's the last go -to experiment. I decided right then that's the last of these I'm going to do. Two is enough. Two is enough. So I guess, and I think you touched on this briefly, there's definitely two spectrums of experimental types, realistic versus controlled. Can you speak to the benefits and downfalls of maybe each?
Speaker: Yeah. Cause I discussed realistic experiments that keep all that variability in place. So you get something that's closer to an actual hunting situation in the past. You have to have some level of control.
Speaker: If we were just throwing at the bison from all different distances and positions, it would have made it harder to analyze the data. So you have to have something that makes the data comparable. And that's why we consistently use the same shafts. Even though we're using several different dart shafts, we're using the same ones over and over again. We're using a limited range of arrows. You have to build up the large enough statistical sample. When you do a controlled test, you're isolating things.
Speaker: So I did a controlled test as part of my dissertation to look at sharpness because what I had seen in these realistic, some people would call them exploratory
Speaker: experiments where you're just exploring what's happening. You don't necessarily have a hypothesis to test. I had seen that sharpness was important. I did a controlled test where I had different target materials, leather of different thicknesses, rubber of different thicknesses, put them up against ballistic gelatin, and shot them from the same shaft at the same draw length of a crossbow that was calibrated to the speed of a dart.
Speaker: into these materials, and I had four different armature material types that I tested on those targets to see if I could recreate what had happened in the realistic experiment. And because everything is controlled, same velocity, same kinetic energy, same momentum every time,
Speaker: That makes it way easier to look at the results and say, yeah, we're seeing the effects of sharpness here. The problem is that the target was not analogous because ballistic skeleton, it turns out, doesn't behave the same way that a body does when a cutting armature punches through it. It may be good for, you know, getting a sense of how a bullet is going to perform, but it doesn't work well for arrows and darts.
Speaker: So there were some problems there that, you know, controlled experiments run into where the results can be misleading if you don't check to make sure that they are representative. So there's strengths and weaknesses to both methods. And I'd say probably more controlled experiments needed to be done to look at armature sharpness of these different material types.
Speaker: See, now remember, because you're using even the high speed camera to see what's going on. And like you showed that as with the ballistic gelatin in particular, it like bends with the point before finally breaking. So there's a lot of give first before it actually allows the armature to basically cut it. So it's losing that the actual penetration depth.
Speaker: Yeah, I had hoped that when these armatures punched through, I could see through penetration depth how they would perform. If a duller armature has to punch through leather, then penetrate in the gel, it should penetrate less deep as one that cuts through that leather more efficiently. Unfortunately, the exact opposite turned out to be the case. I tested metal broadheads,
Speaker: as well as part of this experiment, the exact same, you know, set of broad heads. They were all very sharp. I took one and just doled the fire out of it, just ground it straight down on a sharpening stone until it was extremely dull and it penetrated deeper. So gel is, ballistics gel is highly viscoelastic.
Speaker: It's very sticky stuff. It's very elastic. And when these points were punching into leather, they were able to, the duller one was able to push the leather in farther before it finally fractured the leather and started punching into the gel. Whereas the sharper one began to interact with the gel more quickly. So, you know, the results were completely misleading. And when I saw that, it's like,
Speaker: Well, this whole test is worthless. Turns out though, I could look at the deceleration using the high -speed camera as these armatures punch through the material. So that saved it. And I was able to recreate the kinds of things that I saw in the realistic test.
Speaker: So it seems like it's important to, at least in what you do, to have both the realistic and the controlled and be able to balance those because if that was just an isolated experiment, you would think that, okay, dull points, that's the way to go. It just penetrates so well. It's kind of thing like that. So you have to have that balance. Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah, there's a lot of control experiments out there that people have drawn conclusions from. And when you start actually looking at whether or not they validated the, you know, various aspects, like the target, you start to wonder, a lot of these experiments seem to be problematic. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's it, and I could see why you would want to do controlled experiments because you have the control you can obsess and you can, you can think you could say that stuff, but yeah, I mean, realistic experiments are tough.
Speaker: If you're going to test at little darts replicas, well, you have to have people that know how to use them and how to make them. The trick though for archaeologists is that learning to use these ancient tools, learning to make them is extremely valuable. You know, there's a process where you're developing skill leading up to, to doing an experiment like this and the whole process is useful.
Speaker: because you're reverse engineering an ancient technology. And that just gives you all sorts of insights. I mean, I can't validate this claim, but I can go to a museum and look at artifacts.
Speaker: and just recognize the kinds of processes that we're involved in and making those artifacts, the kinds of decisions people made when I look at historic bows, prehistoric atletals. So it's very useful to do these kinds of experiments despite how challenging it is. But people generally avoid, one of the reasons that people do controlled experiments is because realistic tests are hard.
Speaker: When I gave my, I think I talked about this last time you were on, my thesis prospectus presentation to the Friszen Institute, George just interrupted me and went on a rant about how we need more practical experiments, not controlled ones. And I had to sit there and take it for literally 15 minutes and I was like, okay, all right. And afterwards, Todd texted me and was like, don't worry about it. I think what you're doing is right.
Speaker: I mean, obviously him and Bob are my advisors, but like what we talked about was, like you just said, I can't have great penetration ability or testing, or I can have great accuracy testing when I have humans throwing it. I have to make a machine that does it without error. And then that way somebody can replicate it to be like, this kid's full of shit. And like, obviously you agree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, both of these, these approaches have their uses, they have their strengths and weaknesses.
Speaker: So it's just a matter of balancing them and using both kinds of approach to validate what you're trying to look at. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's just good science too. Like when you're, you're inviting other people to critique you by giving them like literally the methods and materials as to how you did it. And I think that's really important. What was enlightening for me was like after the experiment, we butchered the animals with stone tools. Like there was not a single
Speaker: steel blade. And like, especially when it came down to the bison, that whole idea of division of labor, like it took us a solid between me, you, Donnie dust, Donnie's partner, uh, autumn, your wife and Lana, John Whitaker and, uh,
Speaker: Pat. Pat. Yeah. So that's the eight people, all of which had experienced butchering an animal before. And it took us like four, four or five hours with stone tools to butcher one bison on the ground. It was a beastly. Yeah. I mean, it was tough. And I just remember, I remember at the end,
Speaker: Pat and Donnie were trying to cut the Bison's head off because we had to, we had to disarticulate it to some degree. And so, and I remember Donnie was just, he's just in his shorts shirtless. He just like has blood all over him and he finally gets that head off and he just goes, Oh, I just like plops back, sits back with this giant Harry Bison head, just like in his lap. And he's just like, Oh,
Speaker: I'll never forget that. Definitely probably a sight to see. He also, when he landed it, the bison had in his stomach and he just let out the biggest, loudest fart I've ever heard. Just smiling. He's like, yeah, I'm going to hold that one in. It took forever. Like it took a long time and we had, and it got down to the point where
Speaker: Like rotating, like Lana and Autumn were cutting up bits into smaller, mere manageable chunks. You and John Whitaker were constantly sharpening tools. Their stone tools had to be re -sharpened constantly, which was interesting. You know, I never really thought of it, but a stone knife, you have to re -sharpen it. It gets dull. Would it be more beneficial to, rather than using knives and retouching them, like to just have a big core to cut off sharp flakes with?
Speaker: Well, you lack a handle then flakes are very, or flakes or blades to have a, just a clean, smooth edge are really good for cutting through skin. But it turns out once you get through skin, you're cutting through muscle. A hafted stone knife is a beautiful thing to have. Okay. Yeah. And I mean, it makes sense. Yeah. Like Carlton was saying, it was, it was really tough. We weren't that practice in butchering a bison. This was our first attempt. Yeah.
Speaker: And so presumably it would have gone smoother in the past, but, but you can see looking now at the archaeological record until, you know, fairly recently, the later kick, people were not butchering bison intensively. They were basically leaving the animals intact, articulated, we would say.
Speaker: For the most part, they weren't even removing legs. They were just cutting off the biggest chunks of meat that they could get at on the outside of the animal. And you can get, you know, the majority of the meat off an animal that way if you know what you're doing. But then in the late archaic, people started butchering bison really intensively. And so they were going through all those things that we were doing, but presumably they were very good at it.
Speaker: They didn't waste anything. Sorry. I get that on Tik TOK all the time. And I'm like, guys, there would be no archeology if they didn't leave it. It's like that myth of like the noble savage thing. But anyway, before we wrap up this segment, I don't know if you saw, I think it's season five or season six of alone. It was whatever one Donnie was on the guy who won. He ends up just shoot in his socks. Or he was like going out to forage berries one afternoon.
Speaker: He saw a moose and he just shoots it one arrow and waits for it to die for like an hour and it dies. And then he goes, rather than go all the way back to camp three miles, he just butchers it right there with a Leatherman and then cuts it up and brings it back to camp. And it was the most impressive thing I've ever seen, but that's a moose, not a bison. I imagine it's a little different. Those are big animals. Moose are gigantic.
Speaker: You heard it here first, moose or gigantic? And on that note, we're gonna end this segment. We'll be back with Dr. Devin Pettigrew after Chris Webster sues you with his beautiful voice.
Speaker: Tell me a letter. Welcome back to Episode 75 of Life Ruins Podcast. We're here with Dr. Devin Pettigrew. So we wanted to touch on a couple of things to close this out. So one, hunter skill, like how is it, how is this modern day experiment analogous to indigenous populations? And then also kind of like what was dissertation defense like and how you've
Speaker: So, let's begin with the hunter skill. Cause I remember like probably a year ago at this point in our, in our little group chat with our advisor, just out of nowhere, you drop some like hunting statistic facts of like hunters in the African bush and their success rate and with zero context as to what you were talking about. Yeah. Like almost 90 % hunter success rate per 24 hour period.
Speaker: It was with javelins. And these are for big animals, you know, Kim Spock, wildebeest, zebra, water buffalo.
Speaker: The average is about 30 percent success rate for spears. For sawn hunters, these are sawn bushmen in South Africa. There's many different groups of them. They hunt in different contexts and they hunt in different ways with these spears or bows, the poisoned arrows. They have a variety of different success rates for these different groups.
Speaker: For the most part, they have something like a 30 % success rate per 124 -hour period with spears and about the same with arrows. What's interesting about hunting technology, we generally assume that there's a linear trajectory. A new weapon comes along, everybody adopts it, and you move on, and hunting is better. You're more successful.
Speaker: Well, this is problematized and it's problematized first by the archeological record because we actually have instances where people continue to use spears. In fact, you know, the sawn, historic sawn are a perfect example. They were using spears and also arrows, but in the 1970s and these ethnographies, they were switching more and more to hunting with spears for a variety of reasons. And they were very good with those.
Speaker: When you look at the success rates of modern hunters in the United States that use compound bows, I mentioned they're twice as effective as traditional bows, rifles, that sort of thing. If we were just talking about Colorado or Carlton and I currently hunt, they have a success rate of under 1 % per hunter day with bows and around 1 % with rifles.
Speaker: I mean, you know, you compare these people and you're just like, my God, we suck. Like really bad. What's going on with this? And, you know, this makes all sorts of things problematic about our assumptions about technology and hunting.
Speaker: And one thing you could assume is, well, indigenous hunters who grow up hunting their whole lives are extremely skillful, right? They can track animals. They're really knowledgeable about wildlife, the world around them. And that's probably true to an extent, but in the survey data I did of Iowa hunters,
Speaker: There's no correlation between years of experience and hunter success rates with weapons like rifles. Because of the way we hunt or sight hunters, we just walk around the landscape or sit in spots in the landscape where we can see a long distance animals come out and they get shot with these long distance weapons. So that can only explain so much of this.
Speaker: When I started looking more in depth at the data, what really stands out and what captures this are the densities of hunters on the landscape. Not the densities of prey, but the densities of hunters. The densities of prey in Colorado are actually a little bit higher than they were for the sawn in the 50s, 60s, and 70s when these data were compiled. But the densities of hunters, Colorado hunters are over 1200 %
Speaker: more dense on the landscape than sawn hunters were. And I think Carlton has had experience with this as well, trying to go hunting in Colorado. They sell so many hunting tags. And the animals are living and they go to these refuges and they escape. They're not stupid. They know hunters are after them.
Speaker: They know what people are and what they can do and they know how to escape from them. In contexts where you have extremely low densities of hunters on the landscape, there are accounts where you can just literally walk up to animals. If you do it right, if you walk up just like nonchalantly, you know, I'm just minding my own business strolling up. You can stroll up to Caribou.
Speaker: and shoot them from a close range with arrows like shooting from the hip. People did that in the subarctic. So the problem with modern hunting technology is that the context that produces it also produces extremely high populations, industrialized society, agriculture. It produces these high populations of human beings.
Speaker: And that actually, you know, makes hunters way less successful, it seems, than, uh, their technology can keep up with. So that's, that's, yeah, that's the best I've got for why we suck so bad. That's really interesting. I've always heard, um, uh, anecdotes of like,
Speaker: like herds of deer elk will, we'll stay on parcels that folks don't allow hunters on. And they just kind of hang out there. Kind of like middle finger to all the hunters out there like, Hmm, I'm not getting shot here. I'm going to, I'm going to keep doing this. This seems like a good idea. Dude, last year.
Speaker: Yeah, when we were out last year, there was a property that's caddy cornered into the property that we were hunting. And there's another to our west, another property that a bunch of hunters, and we could see everyone on this property. We could all see each other because of our blaze, and we were all glassing this huge herd of elk that was following the property line that no one hunted. They'd like get to a fence, and they just turned the other way, and we're all just like sitting there like just one of you, please, one of you, hop the fence.
Speaker: Yeah, and occasionally they will and you'll get lucky. But, you know, it takes a lot of skill now. So it's not that modern hunters aren't skillful and it's definitely not that our technology isn't good.
Speaker: So that, you know, that has implications for past technologies. I mean, there are, there are definite examples where people did not take on new hunting weapons as we, we anticipate, you know, coming from modern society, we're obsessed with technology. We think everybody will do what we do, adopt new technology right when it comes to them. But that wasn't the case in the past, you know, not necessarily.
Speaker: So that contact period where we lose all those big herds above low is essentially the perfect intersection between those two, where you have animals that are used to low population densities.
Speaker: And not that you could walk up to them or whatnot, and then you have a newer rifle technology that comes out that eventually just decimates these populations. It's kind of that weird intersection. Yeah, there's a complex number of reasons why those animals were decimated. Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that we could do it, because people weren't just eating bison.
Speaker: We were eating agricultural products, so we could decimate them. We could wipe them out and replace them with farmland. So that's ultimately why that happened. But before that, how people were hunting bison completely different. Before the horse, hunting them using decoys, disguising themselves as bison, as wolves.
Speaker: Wolves weren't scary to bison apparently. So you could crawl up to them and they were effective that way. So, but once the rifle comes on the scene, animals get a lot more skittish. They become very alert. They can become very suspicious of humans. Uh, you know, these aren't dummies. They, they know what's going on. Uh, once they've had enough encounters.
Speaker: Well, I guess speaking of encounters, I don't have a good segue to this. Let's talk dissertation. Speaking of encounters, I was your encounter with your dissertation defense and your enemy committee. So what was the defense process like?
Speaker: Oh, it was just, it was easy. Honestly. I mean, my, my master's defense was the same way. It was a conversation. It was like sitting in a seminar and they just ask you some questions. They didn't ask me any kind of challenging questions that I couldn't answer. It was more like genuine curiosity. What would you say about this? How would you apply the data this way? And they made some recommendations and.
Speaker: That was pretty much how the defense went. So I think if you've done all your homework, going into a defense, if you've thought through all the possible ways, all the possible ways your data could be used. I mean, read things like the Olson Chubbock report. What Joe Benoit did with that data is just remarkable. He just carried it out in every possible direction he possibly could.
Speaker: And if you've done that, you know, you're ready for any kind of question that's going to come up. And we just got new dates back on Olson Chubbock. Cool. How old is it? 400 years older than they thought. So like 1120 or something like that. Lines up real nice with Jones Miller. Yeah. Cool. Late paleo. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of stuff going on then. Lots of different projectile point types.
Speaker: Didn't look a whole lot different from the later archaic periods, actually. No. So who's on your dissertation committee? So do you have like, what, three, four members? Let's see. I had five members, Scott Orkman, Gerardo Gutierrez, Doug Bamford, Robert Hitchcock, and John Whitaker. And the last two, well, I think you've talked about the folks from CU, Scott Orkman,
Speaker: Colorado, obviously we've talked about Doug. Robert Hitchcock did ethnographic work among the sawn, continues to do so, and looking at their hunting data. So he's one of the ones that compiled the data about the spears and success rates. And John Whitaker, of course, does outletl and experiments in flint knapping and was part of all the bison tests and the hog experiment.
Speaker: Cool. Excellent. I think one of the things, like you said, you can go a bunch of different avenues and be prepared for that. But I don't know if you can be prepared for your fellow grad students throwing you under the bus. Right. Could you explain what our dear friend, Mr. Gover? Yeah, Mr. Gover did. Thank you, Mr. Gover. The day before my defense, Mr. Gover was talking to Doug, apparently, and was like, why isn't Devin doing a presentation? He should do a presentation.
Speaker: And Doug's like, Oh yeah, he should do a presentation. So then Doug, you know, emailed me and said, Oh, you need to do a presentation. Great. Thanks, Carlton. Uh, so, you know, I wasn't already stressed or anything, but I had to compile a presentation really quick and you know, it's expected, but I wasn't expecting to have to, and then I expected, you know, it's going to be just the committee in Carlton. It's fine. I'll just throw this together. Cause I had to throw it together the night before. And then like 30 people from the department showed up.
Speaker: Carlton was like that kid who like, you know, your teacher didn't ask for homework to be turned in. And then like the end of class comes around and they're like, Hey, what about, what about that homework?
Speaker: Yeah. Or let's, let's add on, let's tack on an extra assignment to that home. A big one. This'll be fun. I wanted to see it. I was, I was invested in this dissertation. I wanted to know what happened and it was good. It was a good presentation. They're like, I couldn't tell you through it together. Like it was good and everyone enjoyed it. Like, yeah, we had a huge turnout. Yeah. And everyone seemed to enjoy it.
Speaker: When I started giving my thesis defense, like literally 30 seconds before I got introduced and started, I got a text from Carl to be like, what are you up to? Defending my thesis. And he goes, oh, I'll be right there.
Speaker: Along those lines, when I defended mine, cause it took me a while and like, I, you know, can't pay attention and focus at all. I got this like huge rush of like relief when I finished my like thesis and it was like all over, still haven't published it, but you know, that's for another time.
Speaker: So I felt pretty good afterwards and went and did some stuff, but you and I were talking in the interludes here about something called postpartum depression, post dissertation. Yeah, basically postpartum. Yeah, I didn't add this when I did my master's thesis. I was totally perplexed, you know, after I did my dissertation.
Speaker: It wasn't, I had been, you know, on edge all summer writing my dissertation. I couldn't do anything. Couldn't check my email. Any, you know, extracurricular activity just was, or out the window. All I was doing was dissertation work.
Speaker: And I was under a lot of stress. And then I defended and I thought that all of that was just gonna slough off, go away. And I was gonna be relieved and just able to relax. And it got worse. I got like edgy and just irritable and like just sad all the time and like totally unmotivated. I was like, what in the hell is going on?
Speaker: I just want to wait more. Yeah. It's like, ah, I need to work on my decision. Oh, so stressful. What? No, no, it's all fine. It's all fine, but it wasn't fine. And so finally, I'm like.
Speaker: All right, what the hell is going on? You get on the internet, start just Googling things and post dissertation stress disorder was like the first search or it came up in the first search I did. And people are like, what in the hell is happening to me? I have done my dissertation. I've defended it. I've done. All I have to do is make edits, but I'm like really irritable, you know, maybe not quite depressed, but like on the edge of that, just like pissed off.
Speaker: So post dissertation stress disorder is apparently, from what I can tell, it's a real diagnosed disorder, which is the stupidest thing in the world. But yeah, I mean, it's stupid that it happens because, you know, there's no reason for it to happen, but it does. So apparently it's something like postpartum.
Speaker: It's like a, it's in the DSM five or six or whatever, whatever they're on these days. I think it's five. Yeah. That's so interesting though. Cause it, I mean, it is like, we're talking with Carlton about this recently. Like Carlton has been in school since kindergarten, probably preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school.
Speaker: Community college college Graduate school and now you finish it and for you you finish a dissertation Like there's no more school unless you want to go for another one So like I could imagine Yeah, I mean you just like pulling the tension back on a bow and arrow and then it just like Releases and like doesn't go anywhere like misses the turn. I don't know like how to describe it It's like in a dream when you're like reared back with you know some weapon to strike a monster and you're just like
Speaker: Along those lines. Yeah. Like I got something I want to do in the dream, but I can't get to it kind of thing. Yeah. I just scream into the void.
Speaker: Uh, I mean, I think it is kind of like having a baby, you know, here's my, here's my dissertation. Right. Cause he'll walk in the, in the, in the fall. Do you think maybe a lot of this will dissipate like once your reviews are done and like you actually walk, you have the big goofy outfit and then you're like degree in hand. Will that be like the final final? No, I think that's the new level of stress.
Speaker: Yeah, no, no, now now it's, it's dissipating. I'm, I'm pretty good now, but now I have to find a job, which sucks. Oh yeah. There's that. Yeah. I was talking with Doug cause you cause Doug's like, yeah, Devin just graduated. What's he doing? So I'm pretty sure he's hunting Doug and Doug and Doug was just like, yeah, I guess I'm like, yeah, I mean something has to die for Devin to have fun. This is untrue. Um,
Speaker: that can make it more fun if it goes properly. No, I'm not that, not exactly that way. No, Devin's like a very nice, fantastic human being. So I don't think that's a fair betrayal. To an extent, I do enjoy killing things when I'm hunting, but it has to be clean. If it's not a clean kill, that's very unenjoyable. If it's a clean kill, like the arrow goes right where it's,
Speaker: right where it's been to and the animal runs 10 yards and just drops. It's like, yes, that's great. It doesn't go that way. That's not good. That's never fun. But yeah, I'm trying to take it easy for a while. I'm going for a week long. I'll kind of starting tomorrow and that'll help, I think. But it is recommended to take some time off after your dissertation. But now I'm an adult, so a real adult.
Speaker: Yeah, it's never, never ending. There's that, there's that job up in Augustana. Oh yeah. Um, well I've always respected you cause you're an extremely knowledgeable dude. You also put up with Carlton more than most of us have to. And yeah, it's just really cool to hear that you got your Carlton texts me. He's like, yeah, you defend it already. And I was like, what? I think I may be a text your message. I don't remember. Uh, but yeah, your Instagram is doing real well, man. Uh, I love reading your captions cause it's,
Speaker: Thank you. It's refreshing that you put good work into it. You're not just like spewing shit out. Yeah. And I was learning something. I'm really glad you got your doctorate. Uh, it's been really cool having you back on and I know you guys want to. Yeah. Where can our listeners, uh, find you on, on social media? Well, I met AR at Laddle on Instagram. You can look at my website, mine and, uh, my friend, Justin, your net's website, basket maker at Laddle .com.
Speaker: So that's all one word I haven't been keeping up with my Instagram since I've been writing a dissertation, but I'm starting to gradually post a little bit more on there. Yeah. And I'm on YouTube as well, but same, same kind of deal there. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming back on. Thank you guys for having me. This is great.
Speaker: Speaking of being great, guys, if you could rate and review the podcast, especially this one, because it was a really good episode. Go ahead and rate it, review it, send us an angry message, whatever you got to do, but it helps the algorithm. Devin, once again, thank you so much for being on. What are a couple sources our followers can look up? Those could be books, articles, YouTube videos to learn more about ancient weapons technology.
Speaker: Ancient weapons technology. If you get on our website, my friend Justin Garnett has written a book, Practical Atlatlary of the Four Corners. That's a good one for... Atlatlary. Yeah. Yeah, we've recreated all sorts of words from this Nahuatl word, atlat, but that's neither here nor there. So that's a really good one. What else? Ancient weapon tech.
Speaker: Well, hopefully, Justin and I will have a book about outlettles coming out sometime in the near future. We're working on that. So we'll keep an eye out for that. Awesome. Well, yeah, guys, follow his Instagram. It's good stuff.
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 archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. So when my uncle Frank died, he wanted his remains to be buried in his favorite beer mug. His last wish was to be Frank Einstein. It wasn't worth the wait.
Speaker: This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, 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.
