 Hello, I'm gonna talk a little bit about hunting darts from the Yukon, so You're all you're all there right now But what I'm talking about is not Europe at all Talking about sites in the mountains way over there in the Northwestern part of North America and this is an area that has been for for the most of 14,000 years some inhabited by indigenous hunter-gatherers and they were a hunting and gathering culture continuously right up until about a hundred years ago and that and why I Tried to fit this talk into this session is People are always talking about stone tools and and is you know Archeologists are struggles to try to visualize things that are very old and I'm a very often subject to a lot of decomposition So the struggle is real so this is kind of a talk about projectile points But I won't be talking about the stone tool aspect of it all that much So again visualizing stone tools that projectile points, especially the very ancient ones I mean we imagine them as that the pieces at the end of the steer kind of thing and whether they're Sophisticated or not very sophisticated Recreations of them there, you know some of these recreations are based on our research some of them are accurate some of them are not but One phenomenon in archaeology that has been kind of helping us understand how ancient Technologies actually look this ice patch archaeology It's a kind of a global phenomenon that you find all over the world and The objects I'm going to be talking about today come from ice patches and then the southern Yukon And these are very specific task-related sites that we understand as task-related sites They're hunting sites where people were hunting mostly caribou, tinhorn sheep In alpine areas and occasionally bison so everything I'm going to be talking about there It's function was a hunting tool from this type of hunting site And they're preserved because they got lost in these these snow-drifting sites. So What can we see I'm gonna I'm gonna sometimes, you know, we find a lot of very well-preserved things in ice patch Archaeology we've got very lucky last year. I hope this video plays just so you can see What it is that we found? melting Out of the ice you want to see that again just There it is that's a that's a two meter long perfectly preserved hunting dark every bit of the thing was completely intact And it melted out over out of ice over about a three week Period and we were quite fortunate to collect it and it it remained in that in that condition For 6,000 years, so it's a 6,000 year old hunting dark And it is a fine that is kind of 20 years in the making ice patch archaeology and Yukon started about in about 1997 when a hunter turned in this small piece of wood and Yukon territory wood bone all these Organic materials they really don't survive that well. It's a very acidic environment But when we found this it was radio carbon dated to be about 4,000 years old And we realized that we were looking at the part of a hunting tool That was probably related to this this Athlatl type of weapon throwing dart something that we'd only imagined we returned to that site and we We excavated or we let melt the rest of the object out and it was a almost complete 4,000 year old dart So a little bit about what an Athlatl is. It's a a lot of people know it It's we call it a throwing dart It's a spear kind of like what this fellow is holding there spear propelled by a lever. You can see it in these kind of more traditional Aztec drawings And it is a technology that's a regionally extinct in the Yukon from our ice patches We found that hundreds of little fragments of atlattles and and our oldest one is going back now about 9,500 years before present made out of wood and but the technology in this Part of the southern Yukon it disappears abruptly about 1100 years ago and people transition start using the bow and arrow Which is a technology that people in Europe and Siberia and Asia have been using for a very very long time. So our Throwing their collection. It's it's fairly variable and I guess that's the point I'm going to try to drive home to you today Is that there's a lot of variability and a lot of what I'm talking about is mostly from collections that aren't as In fact is that one spirit just showed you from fragments more or less complete pieces Very small fragments of pieces, but there's kind of two things that unified what a throwing dart or an atlattle is Every specimen we have has a dimple of the very proximal end where the hook for that throwing board that I showed you in that Aztec representation goes there's a dimple on every one of them at the end where the where the floor was put in there and Almost every single one of them is tipped with a stone point But between those two parts of the object. There's actually a very surprising Array of variability things that we wouldn't have imagined would be present you know in 1996 so I'll start off with this very Great infographic that someone else made but these are you know after studying these for 20 years We've we've come up with more or less three types of darts So at the top you can see a one-piece dart Most of these are made from Saplings the types of wood that we find in this collection are extremely limited we find willow which is salix birch batula and Spruce wood which is PCA all the one-piece darts are made out of saplings We also have darts with four shafts and what we call segmented darts and a lot of these that other two Categories are made up using different carpentry techniques and different materials. So There's a picture of a one-piece dart that's melted out in various fragments It's this one is willow. It is you see there's sinew lashing Tying things together the point is held in with sinew There's a little bit of fletching at the end all of our throwing darts appear to be flesh But this is a one-piece one piece of woods Someone found a a tree approximately the right size cut it down and made a dart out of it More commonly in our collection we find darts with with four shafts and segments So how I just define the four shafts is a little bit different than we might expect the first way Find four shafts is when there's a piece of the dart that's made Material and in our collections the different materials that we do find to make four shafts are either antler Probably from caribou or bone. So so here's an example of some of the four shafts that we find on Specimens like this one. There'd be a stone point there and that big bar I don't have a stone point in the end of it some of our Ossius four shafts are very Complicated and beautifully designed We also have ones that are much more crudely designed like this one It's just kind of roughly half that of a piece of antler and there would have been a stone point Tied right in there and this end would have been tied to the the within throwing dart Here's an 11 and a half thousand year old example is actually found in Alaska But you can see how these types of four shafts work So this is elk antler and these stone points are just tied right on the end of them Not even in a little u-shaped notch Some of the we've got two projectile points that are Ossius in our collection and aren't designed and some of you will Enjoy this one not for the bi-patially chip stone points, but for microblades. So we've got two of these things This is an 8,100 year old four shaft It's got slots on either side a little piece of art and I have made this This crude Bracket to show how the microblades we think have gone into these things always when we look inside those slots There is little chips of rock and also a lot of screw steps So people were gluing those little pieces into the into the four shaft another way to find four shaft is when The the four shaft of the spear is made from wood, but the wooden part is designed to detach so and a lot of our collections will find This little Chronicle hang at the approximate length of the four shaft There's a projectile point if it's designed to come apart I call that a four shaft and it is I'm not sure if it's a Interesting distinction or not, but we do find that most of our darts are actually segmented darts So this is what I call four shaft but we also find a lot of Elements of these hunting spears that we now call segments and it's because they've got what is they're attached Using this carpentry technique called the scarf and I'll show you a bit what that looks like so Segmented darts could be made of two pieces of wood three pieces of wood four pieces of wood However many pieces of wood are all tied together at these segments sinew and two scarf joints hold the spear together So that's actually surprisingly common variant of the throwing dart and that scarf joint must be pretty From an engineering perspective pretty strong because we even got one dart That's got what my predecessor great hair called an aft shaft So that scarf joint is right at the very back of the dart So imagine the kind of a force going through that Throwing spear when someone whipped it in that little and that piece of wood is about this the thickness of a pencil A lot of our collections some all of our all of our throwing dart collections appear to be flesh so we we identify fleshing either from sinew and little fragments of feather being stuck in the sinew but more commonly when we're looking at the wood you can see the staining of the the sinew and the paint on the on the proximal end of the dart where the fleshing was intact it's very Difficult to identify the types of feathers that we see because they're so rare We don't want to hack them up and do the DNA on them. We see two types of fleshing on our darts More simple one is where someone will take a long feather and they'll they'll just tie the feather on at each end of The of the feather and it creates very simple flesh We're not sure if this is designed to make that the throwing dart spiral in the air a Second type of fleshing style that we find and it's a it's a sample one that we see in the six thousand year old dart but people are Seemingly also making more complex fleshes that make the throwing dart spiral in the air much like an arrow might so What they're doing is there they're clipping and cropping the feathers. These are eagle feathers They're tying the feather on multiple points on the dart as well as wrapping it on the end You can see that they're piercing the the quill of the feather to get those in there. So a very very interesting and complex process for making the fleshings on these darts so and I think I'm gonna Conclude pretty quickly But this is the state that we found this hunting dart in and just to get an idea of you know The type of variability or the complexity of the material use and some of these collections And it would have been present in in in all sorts of ancient ancient country gatherer collections even here in Europe I'll tell you what we know about this spear today So this is a spear that it is made of three segments of birch wood the birch is derived from a tree that was Split into four pieces and then carved down into states Each individual piece tied together with sinew wrapping. We don't know where the sinew is coming from but probably caribou or moose It has got a projectile point tied in All the sinew's on this piece Are treated with a preservative and that preservative that we've been able to identify is castorian Which is a secretion that is coming out of a large you kind of a Lake road of the beaver And it's a very waxy secretion the beaver will rub it all over itself to waterproof its fur People were using that same product to water treat We believe the city is on there. They're hunting that are there is traces of ochre on this material So ground ochre for paint in the half the projectile point people put raw spruce sap in there the form of blue These fletches are made from eagle feather and you can see they're designed by taking each feather Cutting it across cutting the quilt across the end and then they're making these triangular little clips in there each feather is is laid on the The same face of the diameter of the spear and we believe that this type of fleshing is designed to give this spear a counterclockwise Spin in the air. So it's a it's a beautiful piece. Very lucky to have found it. Anyway, that's my thought Thank you. These are my collaborators