Did Archery Technology Precipitate Complexity in the Titicaca Basin? A Metric Analysis of Projectile Points, 11–1 ka

Summary

This is an abstract from the "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" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The origins of Andean archery technology and its impact on social organization remain unclear. This analysis uses metric data from 1,179 projectile points from the Lake Titicaca Basin, 11–1 ka, to identify the timing of archery technology and its potential social consequences. Our data reveal a dramatic decrease in projectile point size at 5 ka, spanning the Late/Terminal Archaic period boundary, signaling that archery technology likely emerged during the Terminal Archaic Period, 5–3.5 ka. This technological transition coincided with the growth of settlements, a surge in the use of exotic goods like obsidian, low intergroup violence, and incipient agropastoralism, all of which intensified during the subsequent Formative period when monumental ceremonial centers emerged. These findings suggest that archery technology did not incite violence but rather contributed to emerging cooperative dynamics that expanded regional exchange networks and community aggregation. We hypothesize that archery technology may have expanded economic opportunities or raised the cost of violent interaction, thereby facilitating new cooperative norms.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• 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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38523.0