Seven Millennia of Wood and Reed: A Preliminary Chronology of Weapons Systems from the West Texas Region

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 arid west Texas region has a wealth of large perishable assemblages offering unexplored research potential. This talk focuses on weapons systems recovered from both recent excavation work and existing collections from this area. We provide an overview of the diversity and age of the weapons from these contexts and then place them within other well-dated regional examples. These results provide one of the longest nearly continuous records of weaponry from any region, enabling us to build a high-resolution chronology. We use this chronology to offer initial thoughts on changes in design, materials, hunting strategies, prey choice, and key technological transitions in projectile weaponry.

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): 41572.0