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

• Autores: Ryan P. Breslawski, Bonnie L. Etter, Ian Jorgeson, Matthew T. Boulanger
• Localización: Lithic technology, ISSN 0197-7261, Vol. 43, Nº. 1, 2018, págs. 26-37
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • 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