Toward Establishing a High-Resolution Chronological Record of the Atlatl-and-Dart to Bow-and-Arrow Transition in the Great Basin

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Perishable Weaponry Studies: Developing Perspectives from Dated Contexts to Experimental Analyses" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The adoption of the bow-and-arrow by Indigenous peoples was a significant event that had profound social and economic effects. In the Great Basin, researchers have traditionally placed the appearance of the bow-and-arrow weapon system between ~1800 and 1500 calendar years ago and assumed that it almost immediately replaced the atlatl-and-dart system. Few efforts have been made to understand when, from where, and how quickly this shift took place. Direct AMS dating of organic weapon components from legacy collections offers a means of addressing these questions. Here, we report dozens of AMS dates on atlatls, darts, bows, and arrows from numerous Great Basin sites. Though much work remains to be done, our preliminary results do not support a rapid transition. Rather, they indicate that the atlatl-and-dart and bow-and-arrow systems were used alongside each another maybe as long as six centuries. As our dataset of directly dated weapon components continues to expand, it will contribute to ongoing conversations about when and why people favored one system over another, and the economic and social effects that such decisions carried with them.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Advances in Perishable Weaponry Studies: Developing Perspectives from Dated Contexts to Experimental Analyses

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37847.0