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The Atlatl with Dr John Whittaker - Episode 8
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On today's show we try out a slightly different format. Dr. John Whittaker, professor and author of many books and papers on flintknapping and stone tool use, starts out the first segment with a lecture about the Atlatl - an ancient spear-throwing device. For the last two segments Chris and April ask Dr. Whittaker about the Atlatl, his experiences with the device, and the growing community of atlatl enthusiasts.
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. The Archaeology Podcast Network is sponsored by Codify, a California benefit corporation. Visit codify at www.codifi.com.
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeology Podcast, Episode 8. I'm Chris Webster. And I'm April Camp Whitaker. On today's show, we're going to be talking to archaeologist John Whitaker and trying something a little bit
John Whittaker's Lecture on Athletics
00:00:39
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different.
00:00:39
Speaker
The first segment of the show is actually going to be a lecture by John about the history and science of athletics. If you're listening at your computer, you can download PowerPoint to go with your first segment. We have the slides in the show notes for this episode. But if you download this episode normally listening, you don't need to worry. All you're missing is visuals, but you should check out the PowerPoint later. The PowerPoint has been uploaded under Creative Commons, and listeners are welcome to use it for any educational purposes.
00:01:05
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All right, those show notes, like April said, will be at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash archaeology. Let's dig a little deeper.
The Atlatl: Prehistoric Technology and Usage
00:01:27
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Hello, I'm John Whitaker. I teach anthropology at Grinnell College, and I'm fond of saying that archaeologists have the best toys.
00:01:34
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Atlatls are one of my favorite prehistoric technologies. The atlatl or spear thrower is one of the earliest mechanical inventions. It's a simple tool that allowed a light spear to be thrown faster, harder, and farther than by the hand alone. When everyone's ancestors lived by gathering wild foods and hunting large game, throwing a light spear that traveled fast and hit with a lot of power at a distance was a great advantage over having to get close to large, dangerous animals with a hand-thrown javelin.
00:02:01
Speaker
The atlat is basically a stick with a handle on one end and a hook or socket on the other to engage the spear, which is mostly called a dart by American archaeologist's atlas slide. There are many forms around the world. The principle is simple. Slide. When you throw a ball or a rock, you use the strong, slow muscles first. You step forward and swing your body and then your arm. The throw ends with light, fast muscles in your arm and snapping the wrist, which gives most of the velocity. So Nolan Ryan can throw a baseball up to 100 miles per hour.
00:02:32
Speaker
An atlat alike your wrist acts as a lever to flip the dart away. Modern dogball throwers work the same way. There's an 18-slide sequence here that shows this. When you snap your wrist with a spear and spear thrower, you in effect have a much longer wrist, so you can accelerate a light spear up to 60 or 70 miles per hour, enough to get great penetration. A hand-thrown javelin, which travels much slower, it must be heavier to do the damage and closer to the target. Prudent prehistoric predators preferred projectiles, with longer range and striking power.
00:03:02
Speaker
Among other effects, you don't have to be large and strong to use an atlatl, so smaller people, women, and young folk could have hunted more successfully. Slide. Spear throwers were used in most of the world, starting in the Pleistocene ice ages, at least 30,000 years ago in Europe, and possibly earlier. The earliest examples we have are some of the carved antler pieces from the caves of France and Spain. These depict the ice age mammals that were hunted there, reindeer, chamois, mammoth, and the like.
00:03:29
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Spear throwers probably came across the Bering Straits with the first people to enter North America. We have atlatl hooks made of fresh Pleistocene animal bone from some Florida rivers. These probably date to some 13,000 years ago at the time of the Clovis culture. Slide. Clovis folk or early hunting gathering people most famously associated with a distinctive large spear point which has been found in a number of mammoth kill sites. Hunting elephants with stone-tipped spears is not a job for the faint-hearted and it was the atlatl that made it possible.
Atlatls in Global Cultures
00:03:59
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George Frisin, a Wyoming archaeologist, experimented with Clovis points and atlatls on African elephant carcasses and showed that you can indeed inflict a killing wound with such weapons. Slide. Atlatls survived into modern times in a number of places. American archaeologists mostly call spear throwers atlatls because they were recognized in the late 1800s by archaeologists working in Mexico and South America, where they're common in the ancient art of a number of cultures.
00:04:26
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The word atlatl or atlatl comes from the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs and related folk. When Cortes conquered them in the 1500s, the Spanish were met with showers of spears. The Aztecs used atlatls for warfare because the heavier dart gave better penetration against cotton and leather armor than a light arrow, and perhaps for symbolic reasons. Slide. The widespread myth that they could penetrate Spanish armor is only partly true. Stone tip darts simply do not penetrate steel plate.
00:04:53
Speaker
but they proved very effective against more lightly armored soldiers and the Spanish learned to fear them. Several elaborate gilded specimens were sent back to Spain as plunder and survive today. Slide. Bows and arrows did not reach Australia in prehistory and the Australians used spear throwers to hunt kangaroos and other game, including the large Pleistocene versions. One of the fascinating things about atlatls is that many different forms developed all over the world. On the small continent of Australia in historic times and to the present,
00:05:23
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were a number of quite different kinds of spear throwers among the different native peoples. Woomera is the most familiar of many Australian names for them, and the most common form used all over central Australia was a flat or scoop-shaped atlatl with an attached hook at one end and a knob of rosin at the handle, which often held a sharp flint. These spear throwers were Swiss army knives.
Transition from Atlatls to Bows
00:05:44
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They were shovels, clubs, musical instruments, carrying trays, and butchery tools, so nomadic desert people could travel light with a small but efficient tool kit.
00:05:53
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Slide. The Australian atlatls tend to be quite large and capable of propelling a relatively heavy dart. Slide. The best known prehistoric atlatls in North America come from the southwest, where finds from dry caves mean that we have examples of perishable artifacts that do not survive under most conditions. The southwest is where I do a lot of my research. The basket maker culture was ancestral to the later prehistoric Pueblo cultures, which in turn gave rise to the various tribes in the southwest today.
00:06:22
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Basketmaker folk were early corn farmers living in small pit house communities, often using canyons and the shelters in them. Slide. They hunted for their meat and rock art depictions show the symbolic importance of atlatls. Slide. Basketmaker atlatls are small and slight. They are beautifully made, sometimes with ornamental feathers and stone weights or fetishes attached. Slide. The surviving darts are also light. They're usually made of a willow shaft with fletching feathers attached.
00:06:51
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and a hardwood foreshaft, which held a stone point. Slide. The atlatl would be held with a split finger grip between the first and second fingers with the fingers inserted into loops of hide or sinew. This is characteristic of the Southwest form. Bows and arrows were placed atlatls and darts in most of the world. Atlatls are lighter and faster, so they're easier to shoot accurate. I mean, arrows are lighter and faster, so they're easier to shoot accurately and at longer range. You can carry more ammunition with bows and arrows,
00:07:21
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and it is much easier to learn to use a bow than to become skillful with an atlatl. Although atlatls are capable of almost equal accuracy at close range in practiced hands. In North America, this transition began around 2000 years ago with bows moving west. It was much earlier in the old world, and most archaeologists believe the bow was invented there, possibly in Africa, and spread. Slide. It is often difficult for archaeologists to tell precisely when this transition occurred.
00:07:49
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On most of the continent, the only evidence of ancient weapon systems that survives are the stone points. These are just not very clear evidence one way or the other. In late prehistory all over the continent, people used small triangular points with a lot of minor variations like where notches were put for attaching them to the arrow. Everyone agrees that these were arrowheads. Atlatl darts in general must have heavier points and probably most of the larger points of many forms that the American public calls arrowheads actually tipped atlatl darts.
00:08:19
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But there is a middle size where points work for either. And we should also remember that all bows were not the same. They differ in size and power. Likewise, there were many different forms of atlatl. The weight of the stone point can also be compensated for by the materials of the shaft and its length. And we must expect that there was a period of transition and experiment when bows and atlatls were used together. In some places like Mexico, bows and atlatls were both used, with atlatls preferred for war.
00:08:46
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In the Arctic, spear throwers survived for throwing harpoons with a line attached, so seals in the water are not lost, while bows are useful for smaller game.
Modern Atlatl Community and Mechanics
00:08:56
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From ethnographic examples, we learned how atlatls were used. And with modern experiments, we can study their capabilities and understand how they work. Archaeologists are not the only ones interested in this. There is actually a small sporting world of atlatls connected to the wider public interest in prehistoric life and primitive or pre-industrial skills and technology. Slide.
00:09:17
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Although none of us grew up in a world where if you couldn't use an atlatl you didn't get breakfast, there are quite a lot of people who have worked hard to develop their skills and a lot of low-key competitions around the country and in Europe where you can test your skills against others. So we have a pretty good idea of what kind of accuracy, ordinary, skillful people can develop with an atlatl. And that means that archaeologists who have not developed such skills themselves should watch people who have and avoid writing silly stuff like you can only use an atlatl by throwing at a large group of animals because they're not very accurate.
00:09:47
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Any real hunter knows that just shooting into a herd almost guarantees a miss, and real hunters aim at a particular target on a specific animal in a group slide. And that's what you do with an atlatl. Atlatls are accurate enough for small game and powerful enough for the largest game. 30,000 years of success testify to this. Best atlatlists today can hit a target the size of dinner plate or the kill zone of a deer nine times out of 10 at 15 to 20 meters or yards.
00:10:14
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10 to 30 meters is the range at which hunting or fighting with early weapons was done, whether we're talking about spear throwers, bows, or muskets. Slide. With systematic experiments and modern instruments, we can understand atlatls in ways our ancestors never could. For instance, we can compare atlatls and bows, which are quite different systems. Slide. Bows work by spring power and atlatls as a lever. Atlatls do flex during a throw, and the dart flexes quite dramatically and oscillates for a while in flight.
00:10:44
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Slide. The curving motion of the at-lattle flipping the dart means that the dart must flex and recover to keep the point on target during a throw, but this flex in the spring back does not add energy to the throw. It is often claimed that at-lattles accelerate the dart to more than 100 miles per hour, but that also is not correct. Slide. A series of experiments with very strong and practiced throwers in a variety of at-lattles shows that 60 to 70 miles per hour is about as fast as an at-lattle dart can go.
00:11:13
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100 miles per hour and above is arrow speed from a good bow. But that does not mean that the atlatl is a weak weapon. Even the light darts used with basket maker atlatls are much heavier than an arrow and thus pack a lot of penetrative momentum and kinetic energy. This too we can show experimentally. We used a pig carcass, we killed it humanely and ate it afterwards, as a target with replica basket maker atlatls, and we found that we could drive a stone tip dart right through the pig if we didn't hit a bone.
00:11:40
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Others have done similar experiments, and some of my friends in Missouri where it's now legal have recently taken dear with atlatls. Slide. Information from modern experiments with prehistoric technology allows us to consider larger issues, like why the atlatl fell out of favor and was replaced by the bow. If early bows and arrows were relatively weak and had less penetrating power than atlatl darts, what was their advantage? I think it's mostly that bows are much easier to use.
00:12:07
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This, too, I have shown with experiments, having one of my classes, all novices, learn to use both and seeing how much faster they could reliably hit a target with a bow. And bows continue the trend in weaponry, which is to rely on more technology and less on human strength, moving the hunter or warrior farther away from prey or enemies while shooting more accurately, more often, and more powerfully. This trend continues today with firearms to guided missiles. Slide.
00:12:34
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If atlatls interest you, the best place to start finding out more is the web page of the World Atlatl Association at worldatlatl.org, which is http://waabasketmakeratlatl.com. Here you can find all sorts of information. We have links to scientific articles, ethnographic examples, and plans for building gear both modern and primitive, a calendar of sporting events, and my large annotated bibliography of atlatl articles.
00:13:02
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A famous anthropologist, Frank Hamilton Cushing, told us over 100 years ago that if you want to study a prehistoric technology, you should make yourself an artisan.
00:13:14
Speaker
Would you like to get more involved with archaeology? Are you looking for volunteer or internship opportunities? Are you already working on community or personal archiving projects and could use some helpful hints? Check out the Ideas Portal, sponsored by Codify. Visit ideas.codify.com, a free and open community tool, and share your ideas, knowledge, and advice on select topics that will lead to vibrant opportunities and initiatives for all aspects of archaeology.
00:13:37
Speaker
from fieldwork to public service. All ideas are welcome, so visit ideas.cutify.com today and make your voice heard. That's ideas.codify.com.
Interview with John Whittaker
00:13:54
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Okay well this is the start of the second segment on this brand new format that we've come up with for the show. We're going to be doing this hopefully again in the future because I love it you know starting out with something that's just you know here's a here's a great piece of information and now we're going to talk to talk to the author or lecturer about that and I think this is fantastic but really give us your feedback in the comments for this show on the website or wherever you saw it so you can
00:14:19
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Let us know what you thought about it and how easy it was to follow along with the slides if you downloaded those, things like that, so we can refine this and make it better for the future. But for now, we're going to talk to John Whittaker about what he just talked to us about at Lattles and how he got interested in it. So John, thanks for joining us. I enjoyed it. Yeah, that was great. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself from what you had in the intro to the lecture, where you teach, things like that. Sure.
00:14:45
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I'm John Whitaker. I teach at Grinnell College. I've been there for about 30 years with my wife, Catherine Camp, who's also an archaeologist and we partner on a lot of things. We do a lot of research in the Southwest with prehistoric societies in the Flagstaff region of Arizona. But the other thing that I do a lot of is prehistoric technology experiments. They're cheap. They're easy. They tell us a lot of things that we want to know. Stone tools and flint knapping are one of my main focuses and
00:15:15
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at levels or another and other primitive weapon technology is another thing that I've worked with quite a lot.
00:15:22
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Yeah, I have just a side note, if anybody's recognizing these last names that John just threw out, his own and his wife's, I have one of each of your books on my shelf right here behind me. So I had them for a while, which is pretty great. So how did you first get interested in the atlatl as like a thing that you wanted to really dive into? Well, you keep coming up across them in the literature you read. I first noticed atlatls as a student interested in the Southwest.
00:15:52
Speaker
And I tried them and couldn't make them work because I had a great big clunky atlatl. There wasn't much information out at the time. And the information I could find on how to use the things was largely wrong. So I sort of gave up for about 30 years. And then I got into flint knapping. I did that for a while and I encountered atlatls at a napkin, at a flint knapping event.
00:16:19
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where a couple people were using them and selling them, demonstrating them. And there was a little competition and I picked one up and I tried it and it worked real well. And I thought, oh, this will be great for teaching and just fun. And once I started doing that, I realized that there was also a lot of archaeological documentation of specimens and experiments that no one had done to understand how the things worked.
Educational Benefits of Atlatls
00:16:45
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But I used them a lot for teaching.
00:16:48
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It's a great way to introduce people to prehistoric technologies. It's simple enough that anyone can learn to throw and get satisfaction out of it in a short time. But at the same time, it's difficult enough that you immediately recognize the skills that our ancestors had to have developed to actually live with these things. And they're simple to make, but they're also complicated and beautiful ones that you can study archaeologically and see in museums.
00:17:18
Speaker
So there are a lot of ways that it ties into the things that I like to do. Well, as you said at the end of your lecture, the best way to truly understand something is to become an artisan or practitioner of it. I completely agree. I don't know how people go out and record prehistoric sites with lithic material on it without understanding how that lithic material was generated.
00:17:42
Speaker
It kind of baffles me. I'm not an expert flint knapper by any means, but I've at least done it and I can understand what makes different types of flakes. And I think that helps in the recording aspect of it. That's exactly right. And, and it's also important when you're teaching about things. I do a lot of hands on teaching because that's, that sticks with the students. It's fun and archeological experiments tell us things that we still need to know. So what kind of experiments have you done and especially what ones have you used your students in?
00:18:09
Speaker
Well, I've done a bunch of experiments with atlatls recently. And one of them, as I mentioned in the talk, is that I've had novices try both shooting bows and throwing with atlatls to show that it's much easier. There's a much faster learning curve with a bow than there is with an atlatl. That's one thing. I recently participated with a couple of friends
00:18:35
Speaker
in an experiment that was looking at the penetration of stone points, the kind of damage you get when you shoot an animal with a stone point, and the issue of whether stone points actually spin a projectile in flight, which some people believe, but is incorrect. So we bought a hog from a local organic farmer, and we killed it humanely, and we set it up on a trestle and punctured it repeatedly with atlatl darts.
00:19:03
Speaker
And we got very interesting patterns. My partner, Devin Pettigrew, whose master's thesis this was, got a thesis out of it. We published an article. We definitively showed that stone points don't spin a projectile. There's just too much projectile behind a stone point for it to have much effect. But what you do see is that these darts and arrows, to a certain degree too, flex in flight. They oscillate.
00:19:33
Speaker
They spin, but the spin is related to the fact that you've got a large flexing projectile. It's very complicated, and there's still a lot of stuff we don't know. We also tried looking at velocity, measuring it with slow motion cameras and with a radar speed gun. And again, one of the sort of myths about atlatls that you hear repeatedly is that you can throw over 100 miles per hour with them.
00:20:02
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isn't really correct. We had some really strong throwers try this, and it's fun to watch them throw. You can accelerate a heavy dart up to 60 or 70 miles per hour, which is quite enough to punch it through an elephant, I think, with a big stone point on it. It certainly worked well on the pig, but you can't get them up to 100 miles per hour. And you don't need to. They're very effective.
00:20:24
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We have quite a powerful weapon system. How do those speeds compare with bow and arrow? With bows? With arrows? Well, ordinary atlatls throw, I don't know, 30 to 50 or 60 miles per hour is kind of normal. 60 to 70 miles per hour is a really strong atlat was trying to throw hard. Bows and arrows begin at about that speed. 100 miles per hour is a good speed for a reasonably strong bow
00:20:54
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with primitive arrows, modern strange compound bows with these pulleys and things can get an arrow much faster than that. But it isn't until you start using things like the very heavy English war bows and the powerful, the large arrows that they used with those, that you can get to the kind of penetrating momentum and kinetic energy that
00:21:23
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an atlatl dart carries. These are both measures of the damage that a projectile can do. And they really work together, but they're a little bit different. And we haven't yet come up with the best way to describe and compare projectiles. Right. So with the variations in speed and penetration power, do you see variations or kind of physical limitations? Or do you need to have certain strength and physical abilities in order to achieve some of these maximum?
00:21:51
Speaker
speeds and penetration? Or is this sort of a weapon where if you become skilled enough at the technique of throwing, you can achieve similar results across different kind of ages and physical abilities? Yeah, I think so. One of the advantages, I think, that weapon systems do is they increasingly rely less on human strength and more on the technology. And at-laws are an example of that at any
00:22:18
Speaker
I have a lot of success with kids and with the women in my classes. They learn to throw quite well. The top women's scores in the small world of sport at-lat lists are throwing closer to the top males now. The big heavy spear throwers that you get in some places, like the Alaskan ones or the Australian ones,
00:22:48
Speaker
I find difficult because it takes a slightly different motion and a little bit more arm strength to accelerate that thing. So there are limitations to any lever system that you can either move a lot of weight or you can get a lot of speed.
Distinguishing Atlatl and Arrow Points
00:23:04
Speaker
And so the heavier your dart is, the less velocity you can get from it, and the more force you have to put into it. So things like the basket maker ones that I talked about, which are quite light,
00:23:17
Speaker
are very easy to use and pretty much anybody can use a dart that size negative projector. Bose just continue that trend. Okay. Sorry, editorial note here. We were having a little bit of Skype pickup. Sorry for stepping on you. Back to it.
00:23:35
Speaker
Can you determine by looking at something that was hit with an atlatl, like any sort of bones or anything like that, whether or not it was hit with a dart from an atlatl or an arrow from a bow? Can you tell that just by looking at it? It doesn't seem like you could. No, that's a very good question. A guy named Carl Hutchings has come up with a way of looking at the microfractures that he thinks reflects the velocity of the projectile, so that you ought to be able to tell at least
00:24:04
Speaker
fast projectiles like atlatls and arrows from slower ones like javelins or hand thrust spears. And I think it's a promising technique that needs a lot more experimentation. But one of the things that you see with projectiles that are moving at pretty good speeds is you get fairly characteristic large-scale fracture patterns. You get flakes that smash off the tip and run backwards down the point
00:24:34
Speaker
opposite to the way that normal flint knapping would work. So you get characteristic damage patterns that reflect projectile use. Whether you can tell the difference between the speeds of the projectile from those remains an open question, I think. Yeah, because I can imagine there's so much variation in maybe the person shooting the bow or something didn't have the physical strength to do it. So that could simulate the impact of an out-lateral or something like that. Right.
00:25:03
Speaker
When we contrast bows and atlatls, we have to remember that there are many, many different bows from little small ones that are used in the Kalahari to the gigantic things that it took over a hundred pounds of force to pull that the British used for warfare and everything in between. And likewise, atlatls are long and short and throw heavy darts and light darts. And mostly we just don't know because the material doesn't preserve very well.
00:25:29
Speaker
Well, that leads to another question then. In a lot of these pictures that you have up in the presentation, there's various lengths on the darts and things like that. Does any of that preserve? Do we know what the lengths of the darts were, the shafts on those darts? Rarely. For the Southwest, we do because we have preserved material. Prehistoric atlatls just don't preserve in Australia, for instance. But we have lots of ethnographic ones. And the general assumption
00:25:57
Speaker
from atlatl experience is that the longer and heavier the dart you have, the atlatl has to reflect that. You can throw a heavy dart more comfortably with a short atlatl, but if you're trying to get a large dart to do a lot of damage, as we expect the Clovis megafauna hunters would have been, then you need a fairly long atlatl and a quite heavy dart like some of the Australian ones.
00:26:25
Speaker
So people experimented and tried different combinations of dart length and atlatl size. This is one of the fascinating things about the sporting world of atlatls. It doesn't get into the archaeological literature very much. But one of the things that people do in that is make their own equipment and try all sorts of stuff. And from modern fiberglass arrows to things that are actually fairly good replicas of prehistoric equipment to
00:26:53
Speaker
things that are wild conglomerations of unheard of parts that that actually work fairly well. Nice. So, you know, I have a question about the the outline of the bow kind of working together. But real quick for our audience who may not be familiar with this, we hear things like arrows and arrowheads and stuff like that and then spears and spear points and things and things like that. And then the darts. Can you give them a can you give the audience a really quick rundown on on, you know,
00:27:22
Speaker
Let's say just for North America, um, what came first, you know, the spear point, then the outlet and the bow, how did that work? Did they work in conjunction with each other? Um, or did one just one technology replace the next? Right. Well, it's, it's complicated. Right. I feel that's a whole lecture. Yeah, it is. And I mentioned that too, but archeologists tend to prefer the term projectile point to waffle a little bit as to whether it's arrow or dart.
00:27:50
Speaker
There has to be a size difference. Atlatls propel heavier points. And many of the things that Americans call arrowheads and find in the fields were probably actually atlatl dart points. The little light points that we see in late prehistory are really only good for arrow points. But in between, there's some kind of middle ground where a point of sort of medium size works for either one.
00:28:17
Speaker
and there has to be a period in time as the bow replaced the atlatl over most of the continent where people argued about the relative merits just as we do today and for a while they survived alongside each other in some cultures they survived alongside each other into historic times because they were used for different purposes um so yeah it's it's complicated and and it's
00:28:43
Speaker
is a fraught question in archaeology because we would like to know when the bow replaced the atlatl.
Archaeological Preservation and Invention Debates
00:28:49
Speaker
But in most areas, all we have are the stone projectile points. And they're not great indicators. They're tricky to use that way. People try all the time. Right, right. There is that middle ground with projectile points where, like you said, you don't know if it was a dart point or an arrowhead. But I imagine some of the really longer ones that we know are either
00:29:12
Speaker
you know, spear points or perhaps at little points. Those, there's, you probably have both ends of the spectrum, right? The really big ones and the really small ones and those ones in the middle are confusing. Yes, that's right. Sure. And we're pretty sure from other evidence that, that the bow arrived late too. Um, you, we see some possible origins of the bow very early in Africa, uh, the earliest bows or the earliest recognizable arrows that we get are from the,
00:29:38
Speaker
sort of end of the Paleolithic beginning of Mesolithic in Europe. And after that, it's a preservation issue in most cases. It's just mushy evidence. Right, right. So this might have to be continued after the break because it could be a longer conversation. But
00:30:01
Speaker
It sounds like, I mean, you talked about Australia, you talked about different places around the world. The atlatl and the bow, it sounds like. The spear kind of makes sense to me to have been independently invented around the world because that's just really just throwing a sharp stick that you may not have even done anything at, right? And then they started adding things to it. That seems logical, but the bow and the atlatl are pretty specific things. And that was independently invented around the world, right?
00:30:29
Speaker
Well, that's, again, a fraught question. Archaeologists tend to think of these technologies as being invented once. It seems to me that the fact that there are so many different forms of atlatls all over the world suggests that they may not have been invented just once. And likewise, bows come out of other technologies. You can develop a bow drill, for instance.
00:30:56
Speaker
uh... there are other precursor technologies that you have to have before you can have bows like good cordage uh... some idea of this of this spring power which you might get out of snares there are a lot of there are a lot of precursor technologies and it seems to me that they probably were invented more than once but it's again it's almost impossible to demonstrate that the one thing that certain is that that atlatls are not
00:31:24
Speaker
impetus or ancestor for bows because they work by a quite different technology. There are people who've tried to promote the idea that the flex of the atlatl and the dart is a spring energy that would lead to the bow, but that just isn't the case.
Atlatl Construction and Design
00:31:38
Speaker
And you can test that very easily yourself. Put an atlatl dart on the ground, press it till it flexes, let go of it, and you'll see that it only jumps a couple centimeters. It really has no forward motion.
00:31:51
Speaker
All that flex is expended in the oscillation and not in forward-propulsing power. Right, and the high-speed cameras of the Paleolithic were not as good as they are today, so. Right. The high-speed cameras of today have confirmed what I just said, too. Right, right. All right, well, I'm sure we've got a lot more questions. Let's take it to break real quick, and then we'll come back with more with John Whitaker.
00:32:29
Speaker
This is Christopher Sims, host of the Go Dig a Hole podcast. It's a show geared for early career archeologists where I bring interviews and casual panel discussions about the challenges and opportunities that many archeologists encounter starting off. So, if you're still in school thinking about going back, just getting started, or want to take the next step, you'll find what you need to Go Dig a Hole. Tune in every other week on the Archeology Podcast Network.
00:33:05
Speaker
All right, we're back with John Whittaker. And I've got some questions about the atlatl itself. In some of your images on the PowerPoint, I did notice that the fletching on one of the arrows looked like it was leaves or something. But I thought they probably mostly used feathers. But is that leaves? And is there any evidence for this in the archaeological record? No, I think maybe one of the slides shows some green fletching.
00:33:31
Speaker
But those aren't leaves. You could use leaves. I have friends who use duct tape for fletching. Anything works. And a lot of atlatl darts don't need fletching if they're properly balanced. The Australians never used fletching. And well, I use fletching because it stabilizes the dart a little bit quicker. I engage in the atlatl sport. Most of the sport atlatlists use fletching.
00:33:59
Speaker
And it's well attested for the prehistoric Southwest where I work. So there are atlatls that have been found that show that were preserved that show these things. Yes. Yes. The preserved atlatl dart.
00:34:12
Speaker
pieces mostly that we have show flexing on them. This is an idea then that developed before bows and arrows. All right. So I have another question about weights and their uses and quantity. It looks like in some of your pictures that there are any number of weights that are being used and their locations. So what are the, give us some details on the weights and how they were used and what they were used for. Yeah, that's another fraught question that's hotly argued among modern and archeological atlasts.
00:34:40
Speaker
What did the things that get attached to atlatls actually do? So the three little weights that you see in the southwestern ones, those are on there because that's a close replica of a particular find, archeologically attested. What they actually did is another question. So an early argument was that they helped with the flex of the atlatl. But since we've shown that the flex doesn't do much for the throw, that's probably not the case.
00:35:09
Speaker
In the Midlands, in the Midwest and Southeast, we have large stone drilled atlatl weights that people call banner stones, reflecting an early idea that because they're beautiful and somewhat fragile, you couldn't use them on a practical weapon, but that's nonsense too. They work very well. What they actually do remains a question. I don't think they have anything to do with the flex of the atlatl.
00:35:35
Speaker
But they do help you balance the spear, which sticks out in front when the atlatl is cocked back over your shoulder. So they stabilize a little bit if you have enough of them. And they also may act as sort of a flywheel to keep the motion of the atlatl smooth and linear rather than wobbling off to the side. So one of the things that we noticed in some of the pictures of the atlatls is the range and variation of hooks, too.
00:36:05
Speaker
So some of them are just sort of little pieces of bone that look that have been added that look like a hook. Some of them are carved into the wooden form of the Adelato. And then some of those really elaborate kind of almost like a platform that the dart is resting on. Can you talk a little bit more about that range and variation and what that might mean or do in terms of Adelato technology and
00:36:27
Speaker
Well, that's that seems more to me of a stylistic trait or a cultural trait. So the southwestern atlatls almost always have a carved integral hook. The Australian ones almost always have an attached hook of some sort. Where the hook is positioned, the angle at which it is and how high it sticks up affects how you hold the dart. And but that's but that's compensated for by things in the grip and the fingers.
00:36:55
Speaker
One of the important things to remember about all of these technologies is that they're systems, that all of the different parts work together and affect other parts. So if you modify the dart and make it longer or shorter, you're likely to modify the atlatl. If you fiddle with the hook, you're likely to fiddle with the end of the dart that fits to it. You can have a socket instead of a hook, but it really doesn't make much functional difference. Same thing with bows and arrows. If you have a stronger bow, you need a stiffer arrow and so on.
00:37:25
Speaker
So a lot of these things, it's hard to tell whether there's an attempt to change the function of the tool or whether it's just how you've been taught to make things. So have there been any experiments or have you done experiments on really scientific experiments on where the placement of these weights, the size of these weights, the number of weights, and things like that? Have you guys done any of this or hasn't been done? And maybe what were some of the results?
00:37:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. And people have tried that. There's been quite a lot of experimentation. That's another thing I like about at-lattles for teaching, is that you can design fairly simple experiments like moving the position of a weight to see its effect. The issue with weights and what their effect might be, especially in the days when it was believed that they affect the distance or force of the throw, is measurement.
00:38:19
Speaker
So usually the simple way to measure the effect of an atlatl is to throw for distance. And you can show that because it's a lever system, the further out towards the hook you move the weight, the less efficient it must be because you have more weight to crank over with your wrist. You have to input more force into it. And you can also show that all things equal, that's going to decrease the distance that you can throw the dart.
00:38:49
Speaker
Likewise, the length of the atlatl as a lever system. As you get shorter and shorter, the less distance you have. But distance is a difficult measure to use because so many other things affect the distance that you throw a dart. The angle at which it departs from the atlatl, the strength with which you throw it, the atmospheric conditions and so on. So you have to have a fairly large sample of throws to show these things. But all of this is possible and all of it has been done.
00:39:18
Speaker
So we know pretty well that atlatl weights don't increase the distance or force of a throw. They do, perhaps, increase the balance and steadiness. Maybe they were just standby. In case you missed, you could pull out the rocks and just throw them at people. Not if you spent many, many hours drilling and polishing a beautiful banner stone.
00:39:44
Speaker
if people suggested things with some of the stuff like banner stones that maybe they're almost like fetishes or yeah that they have a more culturally significant or religious connotation beyond function certainly that's the case i think uh they're they're beautiful they're complicated it took a lot of work to make some of these the southwestern ones are mostly little relatively small carved stones that probably don't have a great weighting effect and they probably
00:40:13
Speaker
They don't require the same investment that some of the Midwestern banner stones did. But because an atlatl is an important weapon, we can expect that it had a lot of symbolic connotations, that you want to magic it as much as possible. This is how people think even today. And I'm sure that the weights and the banner stones and the other things that gets attached to atlatls had some significance like that.
00:40:41
Speaker
One of the earliest archaeological uses of x-rays was to x-ray the bundle of stuff attached to a southwestern atlatl. A guy named Kulin did it, along with Cushing, who I mentioned. And it appeared that the bundle of stuff around the handle of an atlatl included a, I think there was a predator tooth and some ochre and some feathers and some other stuff in there, which presumably are there for the magical power of the thing.
00:41:11
Speaker
So the atlatl itself, aside from, you know, adding decorative weights and hooks, are they fairly simple to make? Oh, yes. You can make a very easy atlatl. I have a form and it's posted on the World Atlatl Association webpage that I call my 10 minute atlatl, which I can make in my woodshop in a few minutes. Basically, like I said, it's just a stick with a handle and a hook.
00:41:38
Speaker
And the dart is actually more difficult to make. You need a good straight but flexible piece of material which can be milled wood. I use cane because I have a bunch of it. Bamboo stakes from the garden shops if they're not too stiff work. Modern arrow shafts spliced together of aluminum or fiberglass or woodwork. A simple wood dowel is okay if you get the right
00:42:07
Speaker
diameter and it flexes the right amount. You want it not too flexy and floppy, but it has to flex a stiff piece of material like a broomstick just won't throw. But atlatls are very simple to make. That's one of the reasons I like them as class teaching material.
00:42:24
Speaker
All right, so you mentioned briefly at the end of your lecture, John, that there are some modern communities here that are interested in the atlatl and that are doing things. But to kick that question off, somebody must have done this in carbon fiber, right? There's got to be a carbon fiber atlatl out there somewhere with modern dart points. Oh, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. There are a few places where you can buy atlatls. Again, find them on the website.
00:42:53
Speaker
of all sorts. And like I said, one of the fun things in the sporting world is making and trying different kinds of equipment. So I've seen atlatls made out of half of a bow, or half of a ski, or pieces of tennis rackets. I've made a couple out of pool cues.
00:43:16
Speaker
Any piece of material, there are no rules about this in the low-key competitive world that we have, so anything goes and people have tried just about anything you can imagine.
Modern Atlatl Usage and Legal Aspects
00:43:29
Speaker
Nice. When the zombie apocalypse hits, you're on my team. You bet. I'm probably the best armed professor on campus.
00:43:40
Speaker
Nice, nice. It's all primitive. Hey, it works. It works. It got them through for thousands of years, right? Absolutely. So going back to the modern question, I'm sure some people have tried, some people are actually hunting with these things. Would they do that like in a bow season? Because I'm sure there's no at-lot of season. That's correct. There are only a few states where it's actually legal. Missouri
00:44:03
Speaker
just a couple years ago managed to get it legalized after considerable lobbying of the DNR and demonstration that it works and makes clean kills and that there aren't going to be a lot of yahoos out there trying it and hurting animals without killing them. To use an atlatl for hunting, you have to get close. You have to be fairly good. The misses don't go very far, so it's about as safe as a projectile sport can be. And like I said,
00:44:33
Speaker
propels a heavy dart, you get good penetration, it'll go right through a deer just the way a modern arrow will. A few of my friends in Missouri, now that it's legal in the last two seasons, have managed to kill deer with with atlatls.
00:44:48
Speaker
So it's not surprising, of course. We did it throughout prehistory. It fed a lot of families, that's for sure. That's right. So I actually have an atlatl that was made by a Native American that we worked with at a company out of Colorado. And we were working up here in Nevada. And he just kind of did that in his spare time. But I've actually never thrown it because he gave it to me. And then I never had any
00:45:15
Speaker
sort of training or anybody show me how to do it. What's the learning curve on this? If somebody were to take me out right now, how long before I'm making relatively accurate shots do you think on the average person? Oh, depends on your, if you can throw things, you can use an at-lateral. Right. So I take my classes out, all of them try it in an hour or so I can get people happily throwing. They're not hitting the target all the time, but they can see that if they practice, they will. And I have a, I host an event
00:45:45
Speaker
at my college every spring. And I usually take a group of students to an event at Cahokia, which is a fabulous prehistoric site near St. Louis with a very nice interpretive museum and the spectacular prehistoric mounds. And they've been good hosts to the Missouri Atlatl Association. So we have a yearly event there in September. And I generally take a group of students, those who practice
00:46:15
Speaker
can find themselves competing successfully or at least having fun. Those who don't practice can still have fun. It's a very low key and supportive competitive atmosphere. We like to recruit people. We feel that education is part of our mission as non-academics as well as academics. It's one of the things I like about it. So one of the things I like talking up is the non-academic world of at-lattles.
00:46:44
Speaker
There are a lot of people out there now who are very interested in prehistoric technologies of all sorts, and some of them work very hard and develop amazing skill with the stuff, flint knapping being a particularly good example, but all sorts of stuff, firemaking, prehistoric bows and atlatls and such. So taking my students to these events exposes them to a bunch of people who have a lot of skill and knowledge, but aren't integrated into the academic world.
00:47:13
Speaker
So a lot of what they know doesn't reach some of the academics who actually could use some of that exposure in many cases.
Resources for Learning and Building Atlatls
00:47:23
Speaker
And it's just fun. It's a real nice community. The internet has connected people in ways that weren't possible before. There's a vast amount of information out there. YouTube videos showing you how to throw.
00:47:38
Speaker
Some of them terrible and most of them pretty good. Like everything on the internet, right? There are various state societies. They're pretty small. The sporting world of atlatls is, I don't know, a few thousand people. But that's who comes to our events. The actual membership of the World Atlatl Association is much smaller. But there are European events that are fairly good size sometimes.
00:48:08
Speaker
So there's a there's a there's a pleasant community of Atlas who are interested in discussing this stuff teaching newcomers educating the public Experimenting right do you do can you um could you you mentioned the YouTube videos? And I know that's typically where a lot of people go first especially after they hear this Do you have any that you could recommend that we could possibly link to in the show notes that are some of the more safer more sane ones? Not off the top of my head, but I could probably find some
00:48:38
Speaker
However, if you go to the World At-Lattle Association webpage, there are links to all sorts of these things, and that's probably the best place to find them. I also have a short segment of sort of coaching how to throw with an at-lattle, with some of the pictures that I used and a verbal description of how to throw, which is a useful place to start, too.
00:49:05
Speaker
And on the World Atlatl Association webpage, are there also instructions for people if they want to make their own atlatls and experiment with it and get themselves started? Yeah, there are explicit instructions for various forms of atlatl. I mentioned my 10-minute atlatl. There's a little picture essay on that. There are a lot of pictures of other models of atlatls that one can imitate. There should be my friend Justin Garnett, who has two nice little books on
00:49:35
Speaker
how to make and use at-lattles. There are other ones out there. There's a lot of information, fairly easily accessible
John Whittaker's Publications and Episode Wrap-up
00:49:42
Speaker
now. And we'll make sure to have all those links in the show notes for people too. Yeah, absolutely. So here in the final minute or so, John, is there anything you wanted to let our listeners know that we didn't ask you that we didn't get to?
00:49:54
Speaker
Any resources? We covered it pretty well. Atlatls are fun and scientifically interesting. People should try them. OK. And I will mention also that we're going to link in the show notes because, well, I'm actually not sure when they come out. It's new to me. But you have a book. I have one of your flint knapping books from a while back when I was in college. But I also noticed you have a book called American Flint Knappers, I think, called. And we can link to that in the show notes as well. That's right. That's part of my flint knapping stuff.
00:50:23
Speaker
The first one is basically how to flintnap and how archaeologists look at stone tools. The other one is more of an ethnographic study of the modern non-academic flintnapping community, which links to the atlatl community and others. Excellent. Yeah, that first book, that's the book we used when I was in my flintnapping class in my undergraduate training. Oh, that's nice. I think it's still useful, although now we have the YouTube
00:50:52
Speaker
information and other documentation like that where you can see people who are very skillful actually doing the flint knapping or the atlatl throwing and that's even more useful than a verbal account in pictures. Okay well thanks a lot John and I hope that we can have you on again to talk about some other lithic technologies or things like that and again thanks a lot for doing this. My pleasure enjoyed talking to you.
00:51:17
Speaker
And then for all of our listeners out there, don't forget, let Chris and I know what you thought of this new format and the lecture and PowerPoint. John is more than willing to have people use those as long as, you know, he gets some acknowledgement that he's the one who put that together and we hope it's helpful, especially for, you know,
00:51:34
Speaker
people who are trying to learn more or people who are trying to teach others about at a lot of, you know, faculty and things like that. So let us know what your thoughts are. OK, and that's it. And definitely come back next time. And if you haven't heard about the three sixty five podcast, this will the lecture portion will be on there so you can search it over there as well.
00:52:10
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeology Podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. You can provide feedback using the contact button on the right side of the website at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com or you can email chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Please like and share the show wherever you saw it so more people can have a chance to listen and learn. Send us show suggestions and follow ArchiPodNet on Twitter and Instagram.
00:52:34
Speaker
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00:53:12
Speaker
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00:53:29
Speaker
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