The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Only hominids can effectively propel objects through space—projectile weapons have helped us occupy nearly every ecosystem on the planet. The most radical refinement to this armament was the bow and arrow, which is exclusive to Homo sapiens. Tracking these technologies in the past is a key challenge in global archaeology. This worldwide session encourages large-scale comparative perspectives. We invite papers that discuss methods, comparative baselines, and metric thresholds for more reliably identifying weapon systems based on projectile point measurements, regional overviews on the initial invention and cultural transmission of projectile technologies, relationships with other coincident changes (for example, demographic and economic shifts such as domestic plants and animals), and the impact of projectile technologies on conflict and war. In most regions, bows replaced spear-throwers, while in some regions they coexisted. Refined chronologies are key pieces to this puzzle, which allow us to better track independent inventions, the pace of cultural transmission, and whether other changes came before or after the initial appearance of new weapon systems.