Atalatal--what are you? Let us define it.

[stryker-one]

I was reading a post earlier and got a topic idea. Can we define Atalatal and get some accepted definitions and history of this shaft launching device--I really would like to know a time line that is accepted by the scholars that explains when the Atalatal was used and when the bow and arrow started to make it's appearence in the Americas. I have no real idea.

I think there are learned people here that have studied this and can educate us (me) on this. I usually do not use the term Arrowhead when I am talking about knapped projectile points--because I am not sure if what I am talking about is an Atalatal point or a lance point, or a knife. I can pretty much decide if I have some flakes or a knapped scrapper.

I just think it would be good for me to hear some discussion--and see some examples of what the archeology profession has determined when Atalatal points evolved into real arrowheads.

Come on Cannon, Adena Man, and Matt I thing you guys know enough to put forth some opinions--and no unfair, ah discussing .

Please!!

Stryker

 

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[bruce]

Hello,

I've made a few of them Strker they are thrill to
do. My record throw is 57 paces but the real people could throw 125.
What do what to know?

Thanks,
Bruce

 

[stryker-one]

Just when did the ancients decide to start using the bow and arrow and stop using the Atalatal. I know no person knows for sure when this happened. I would just like a ball park best guess--something that is accepted.


Stryker

 

[Kentucky Kache]

This is a good topic. I'm interested in the answers, but I also know that the accepted answers are not always the correct ones.

 

[stryker-one]

Perhaps we can define them here to our satisfaction--if someone will find a place to start. Kenewick Man was reported to have had an Atalatal point embedded in his hip and lived another 30 years--he is accepted as the oldest native american skeleton found 9400 years old. So we can speculate that Atalatal points were being used in North America then (if we accept the data on Kenewick Man).

That is a start

Stryker

 

[tomclark]

In my area of FL the Bow and Arrow "replaced" the atlatl around 500 BC I believe.

 

[stryker-one]

Thanks for the input--Is that good solid data Tomclark? In AZ I heard it said that the Anasazi used Atalatals and that the abandonded their home areas around 1150 AD--that still allows that Bow and Arrows could have been used in you neck of the woods--if there was no trade or travel toward AZ by the ancients--that is why we need some trained folks kicking in info.

Stryker

 

[PALEOMAN]

generally speaking, here on the high-plains the late prehistoric period begins around 500 a.d. this is when there was a change in projectile point types and sizes often thought to reflect the introduction of the bow and arrow.

 

[stryker-one]

Cool, Paleoman now we are getting there.

Stryker

 

[Adena_man]

Just when did the ancients decide to start using the bow and arrow and stop using the Atalatal. I know no person knows for sure when this happened. I would just like a ball park best guess--something that is accepted.


Stryker

I think they started using the bow during the Mississippian period.

 

[Adena_man]

Hello,

I've made a few of them Strker they are thrill to
do. My record throw is 57 paces but the real people could throw 125.
What do what to know?

Thanks,
Bruce

Hey Bruce! Are they very hard to make? It would be pretty cool to learn how to use one. It would give you a little insight into what the ancients had to do in order to kill game.

Brian

 

[Cannonman17]

Very cool subject. There has been a lot of debate about this over the years! I don't know where to start.. Archaeologists have understood for a long time that at first there were atl atls and not until relatively recent times were there any bows and arrows as we know them today... this was further complicated when at sites all across the u.s. excavations revealed relatively small sized points (ones that we might assume were arrowheads) were found stratigraphically below levels where we thought he bow and arrow was thought to arise. This lead some to believe that the invention of the bow and arrow were not a late woodland invention but perhaps an archaic one. It wasn't hard to argue the case when one looks at some of the fairly small points of the archaic period.

Another thing that didn't make sense were the size and apparent use of many artifacts over the archaeological record.. we will often see points like the Raddatz I found the other day in archaic sites dating from two and a half to five thousand years B.P. These were clearly made for an atl atl... fairly large and heavy.. fairly well made with pressure flaking techniques applied.. then there is a transition to smaller side notched and stemmed points.. and then a transition back to larger points of the contracting stem variety like waubesas... didn't make any sense... but then some people started to weigh the points, measure them, and make broad comparisons..most importantly some people started to look at some of the extremely rare examples of recovered hafted points (mostly from the southwest) then things started to fall into place.

The larger corner notched and side notched points of the archaic and earlier times were infact atl atl points but they were attached to the main shaft.. thus the larger and heavier size actually helped to balance them in flight. Somewhere in the late archaic / early woodland it finally became apparent that it took more work to make a decent spear shaft than it did to make a point and the socketed point was invented. All that was is a spear shaft with a hollowed out forshaft where the point, attached ahead of time to a 7-10 inch piece of wood was simply put into the hollowed out shaft. This meant that when the hunter hit his mark the spear tip and six to ten inch piece of wood it was hafted to would stay in the animal if not felled right away and the main spear shaft could be picked up, have another point put in the front, and reused in rapid succession, improving the reloading process so to speak but more importantly not letting the buffalo run away with all your hours of work it took to create the shaft itself... this also meant that smaller points were better suited for the more narrow for shafts.. detachable spear points = smaller points to keep balanced ... so the smaller durst and other expanding stemmed points now made sense.

Then in the archaeological record in the woodland period there is a sudden explosion of contracting stems... they are larger, usually manufactured in a faster percussion method only as is evident by the many step fractures one finds with these and lack of fine edge work. The contracting stem on these was the strange part.. they don't seem to make sense in terms of hafting.. contracting stems of any kind don't lend themselves readily to staying tied on to anything.. and apparently they weren't.. it is now believed that they were meant to come out of the socket.. of even the forshaft... I think somebody realized that saving the whole spear was a great idea and saving even the ten inch piece of perfectly straightened and hardened wood was even worth saving so they started using points that allowed for the recovery of these as well.

Okay... it's impossible for me to try and explain it but boiled down there were really two types of atl atls... type one was the solid shaft with the point attached right to it.. from paleo times up until the late archaic... then type two from the late arhaic / early woodland until who knows.. the bow and arrow is thought to have been a late wooldand invention... possibly as early as 1 A.D. but certainly on the archaeological record books by 500 A.D. I would say that the majority of arrowheads you find were made from 1000 A.D. to contact times... some still consider older notched points to be true arrowheads because of their size but their use as socketed atl atl points is more likely.

 

[Cannonman17]

Here's a fantastic article that covers what I tried to but about a hundred times better- http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3904/is_200204/ai_n9064134

 

[stryker-one]

Cannonman.

Thank you for the Hixton, received it Saturday . Nice material. I am unsure as to wether we (Oregon) has that around here (west of Cascade Mtns). Now I know what Hixton is and I'll be on the lookout for it.

So basically the Bow and Arrow--for our purposes--came on the North American scene 1500-2000 years B.P. give or take. Okay I can work with that.

That was a very clear and concise explanation of the different types of shafting, shaft, and "dart" socket combinations. The explanation also shines a light on how researchers arrive at opinions of why a point was designed with or without a notch.

Very interesting field of study.

I will take a look at the other site you suggested. Thank you for your input and the Hixton.


Stryker

 

[Abbey]

Very cool topic-- and one which I've been wondering about recently too. Where might I find decent illustrations of the two types of atl atls? I've had a hard time understanding, visually, how it all fits together. In fact, I've only seen a hand-drawn illustration- but not a 'break-down'. Suggestions? Good topic Stryker!
A.

 

[Cannonman17]

The first type would have been one long shaft... all one piece with the spear attached right to it. The second type would have a fairly long shaft but at the end it would be socketed so that tips could be put into it. The advantage being if you hit say a deer but didn't kill it with a type one it could very well run away with not only the spear head itself but the whole spear- which was a lot of work gone bye bye. With the socketed end the main part of the shaft would simply fall out and leave the forshaft with the spear head imbeded in the prey. Here's a terrible illustration for you:

 

[Abbey]

Thanks Cannon- I appreciate that- all. So the contracting base style points of the larger variety were meant to fit and be used in the later, type 'B' atl atls? Meant to disconnect from the shaft-extender and stay in the pray, yes? That would explain a lot. Your illustrations help a lot. I always imagined an atl atl to be more like a jia-ali (sp) (Sounds like hi-ly) scoop-tosser. Or a lacrosse stick- something that would be used with an over the head throwing motion- like a baseball, rather than a spear-throwing motion. Hmm.

There's been some fresh interest in my area (a fine program on the History Channel recently) which explains- to a degree- why we're finding paleo and early Archaic items. At least they speculated on why. Much of what I find-- nearly every bit of it, in fact, is found riverside, so errosion basically kills any notion of age in correlation to in-ground depth. Killer dust storms, it is speculated, lay a heavy, 1-foot+ layer of dust right around the 10,000 BP time zone. That, and the fact that there were lower water levels/ocean levels explain why early items are so hard to find and identify as such. Either they get kicked up by a major storm- from what used to be solid/dry land to the shore, or they errode from the bluffs and banks and fall to the water- only to get mixed in with later items.

Thanks for the article and for your time. Wish there was something like that article on the EAST coast!
Abbey

 

[Abbey]

OK now I'm even more confused. Check out this article:

http://www.worldatlatl.org/Articles/TakochCD/lyons atlatl weights.pdf

Much of the info is about bannerstones, their use and placement, but I don't see a dart/point in any of the illustrations, and am not sure how it all fits together. Call me a dummy, but I'm just not getting it yet.
Thanks again!
Ab

 

[Neanderthal]

I will admit that I haven't read all of the posts on this thread (I have a very short attention span), so I'm probably only repeating what some others have said.

The earliest known usage of the Atlatl was over 15,000 B.C., in France. However, it's surmised that they were in use some time before that. Their inception in the America's appears to have started as early as Paleo. For instance, Folsom appear to be mainly dart points. However many points did serve multiple purposes (projectile, knife and etc).

They lasted a very very long time, throughout most of prehistory into historic. In fact, there have been reports of aboriginals using the Atlatl darts down in South America into the late 19th, early 20th century. It's thought that the atlatl is much easier to use and navigate boats while hunting waterfowl with AtlAtl than by bow & arrow. Thomas Hester states that the crescents from down south are used to tip Atlatl darts when hunting these waterfowl, which works for me. Any bird hunter knows that you cannot take down a bird effectively with a sharpened tip, it takes some blunt force trauma to take them down. You only have to look as far as modern fowl hunting arrow tips to see that this is the case (Judo & Loop tips for bird arrows).

A common belief is that indians used to enjoy poking on big fuzzy elephants with long sharp sticks to take them down. Sorry, I can't buy into that. Too many holes in that scenario. I personally don't believe the "thrusting spear" was used to much degree by the Native Americans. This is a belief romanticized and perpetuated by movies and the media. The fact is that Atlatl's are stronger, more accurate, safer, and can be used at a greater distant...and they had this technology in paleo times. You would only need to carry around 1 Atlatl shaft and a handful of small foreshafts. Once your dart was deployed, the foreshaft would detach. You pick back up the shaft, stick another tapered foreshaft into the socket of the Atlatl shaft and voila...'repeating spear'. Atlatl's are simple and yet VERY effective.

The url below will have some Atlatl images if you want to see some being thrown. It's the Spavinaw knap-in from last year.

http://arrowheads1.com/events/knap in/knapin.htm

 

[Cannonman17]

Thanks Cannon- I appreciate that- all. So the contracting base style points of the larger variety were meant to fit and be used in the later, type 'B' atl atls? Meant to disconnect from the shaft-extender and stay in the pray, yes? That would explain a lot. Your illustrations help a lot. I always imagined an atl atl to be more like a jia-ali (sp) (Sounds like hi-ly) scoop-tosser. Or a lacrosse stick- something that would be used with an over the head throwing motion- like a baseball, rather than a spear-throwing motion. Hmm.

My little drawing there isn't of the entire atl atl... just the shaft, not the lever. I believe the contracting stems were used in what really amounted to a modified version of the first type. See how in the first type there isn't any socket and the point is tied right to it? Well they found that by creating the socket they could save most of the spear shaft and many hours of work and switched to type two... and this is the point in history when points get smaller again in spite of the fact that the bow and arrow hasn't been invented yet and this is also why some have argued for many years that the bow and arrow was invented before what most think it was... anyways.. the third evolution was with the contracting stem which would fall out or stay in upon impact.. it was used I believe on a type one, put right into the main shaft, and when used only the point would stay in- this of course again saved many hours of work by allowing the hunter to more often than not retrieve his spear shaft if not the game itself.. and this third evolution also saved the time required to create the smaller 6-10 inch piece that fit into the socket.. now some simple pine pitch or similar natural glue would be all that would be needed... you could carry a few of these in a pouch and simply replace the point itself. This also explains the contracting stem because it, by design, is not very well made for tying it onto something tightly... all different kinds of bases are MUCH better suited at being tied on tight and not meant to come off. This also explains why many contracting stems appear to have been made by simple percussion flaking with not a lot of pressure flaking... they were expendable points, at least more so that the spears they rode on. It also explains why very few contracting stem knives are found... they don't haft very well to handles although IT CAN and WAS done.. just not real often.