The Atlatl to Bow Transition: What Can We Learn from Modern Recreational Competitions?

ABSTRACT

The transition from the atlatl to the bow and arrow happened numerous times in prehistory, and it often accompanied changes in socio-political complexity and labor organization. Recent work relying on longitudinal scores from recreational archery and atlatl competitions suggests that changes in socio-political complexity and labor organization arose due to between-technology differences in learning rates: bows take more time to master, and thus their benefits are not as easily obtained as those of atlatls. We discuss comparability issues with these recreational data sets. Additionally, we show that the learning curves underpinning this hypothesis do not account for inter-competitor variability in learning rates and that sources of uncertainty were omitted from the analysis. We use multilevel models to carry out an analysis of the score data that circumvents these problems. The multilevel models indicate that at best, the modern recreational data are consistent with similarly modest score gains for both technologies. These modest gains are probably unrelated to learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Bow and arrow
• atlatl
• learning
• socio-political complexity
• multilevel models

Acknowledgements

John Whittaker, Andy Speer, and two anonymous reviewers provided comments that greatly improved this manuscript. We also thank Grant McCall for his recommendations as editor and Richard McElreath for his advice on interpreting DIC values. This work was presented at the 75th Annual Plains Anthropological Conference in the session “Taking a Closer Look: Archaeometry and Statistical Analyses on the Great Plains,” organized by Whitney Goodwin, Abigail Fisher, and Kacy Hollenback. This paper stems from discussions held in a working group on Bayesian modeling at Southern Methodist University during the spring of 2017. Any mistakes are ours alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ryan P. Breslawski is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. He studies the foraging economies of the Snake River Plain and Great Plains of North America, especially as they relate to bison exploitation.

Bonnie L. Etter is a graduate student at Southern Methodist University. She studies historical archaeology in Texas, with a focus on Spanish Mission occupations. Her research interests include geographic information systems, lithic technology, community-based archaeology, and public engagement.

Ian Jorgeson is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. He uses computational approaches to model processes of population aggregation and disaggregation at large ancestral Tewa village sites in Northern New Mexico during the protohistoric period.

Matthew T. Boulanger is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. His research interests involve the study of Paleoindian stone-tool technologies, quantitative methods, archaeometry, and landscape ecology.

ORCID

Ryan P. Breslawski http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8336-1295

Additional information

Funding

This project was completed without funding.