Blunt Impact: The Role of War Clubs in Prehistoric Californian Warfare

Summary

Conflict archaeology has recently begun to focus on the effect of warfare on hunter-gatherers. A key issue in Southern California revolves around the effectiveness of indigenous weaponry. Numerous accounts describe club-like weapons as well as bows and arrows. Little archaeological evidence, however, is available on the role and impact of these weapons on conflict. This paper reports on experiments designed to document trauma inflicted by weapons replicated from archaeological and museum collections. The experiments utilized the weapons on pig carcasses both with and without indigenous armor. Trauma to tissue and bone was recorded and compared with accounts from Europe, the Eastern Woodlands, and Polynesia. These data were then used to assess the impact of the weapons on severity of injury and casualties in Southern California pre-contact warfare.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage