The Bow That Wasn't: On the Absence of the Bow in Aboriginal Australia

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 nearly worldwide diffusion of the bow is often interpreted in terms of its superiority over other weapon systems. There is, however, at least one exception to this diffusion: Australia, where this weapon was never locally invented, and never spread from neighboring regions, although Aboriginal Australians near the Torres Strait were in contact with populations that used this weapon. Based on ethnographic literature and the comparative assessment of weapon systems, this presentation investigates the reasons for this situation. We suggest that, in the local conditions where Aboriginal Australians witnessed the use of the bow, this weapon did not present significant advantages over the spearthrower, precluding its adoption and even triggering a reverse movement (spread of the spearthrower among Torres Strait Islanders previously using the bow). In other parts of Australia, where the use of the bow might have proved advantageous, its non-invention might illustrate the rule that invention events for this weapon (vs. adoption through diffusion) are globally rare, if not unique. The evolution of weapon systems must be approached through local scenarios encompassing conditions of use and the history of techniques, rather than viewed as a reflection of cognitive capacities or of the intrinsic parameters of each weapon.

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): 38792.0