The Wooden Club: The Oldest Weapon or Myth?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There is a popular idea that archaic humans commonly used wooden clubs as their weapons. This is not based on archaeological finds, which are minimal from the Pleistocene, but rather on a few ethnographic analogies and the association of this weapon with simple technology. This paper presents the first quantitative cross-cultural analysis of the use of wooden clubs for hunting and violence among foragers. Using a sample of 57 recent hunting-gathering societies from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, it is shown that the majority of them used clubs for violence (86%) and/or hunting (74%). Whereas in hunting and fishing the club usually served only as a secondary tool, 33% of societies used the club as one of their main fighting weapons. Based on these results and other evidence, it is argued that the use of clubs by early humans was highly probable, at least in the simplest form of a crude stick. The great variation in the forms and use of clubs among recent hunter-gatherers, however, indicates that this is not a standardized weapon, and that similar variation may have existed in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35971.0