Historical and ethnographic sources depict use of portable braced shaft weapons, or pikes, in megafauna hunting and defense during Late Holocene millennia in North and South America, Africa, Eurasia and Southeast Asia. Given the predominance of megafauna in Late Pleistocene North America during the centuries when Clovis points appeared and spread across much of the continent, 13,050-12,650 years ago, braced weapons may have been used in hunting of megaherbivores and defense against megacarnivores.
Clovis points with distinctive flute or channel flake scars. Image credit: S. Byram.
“This ancient Native American design was an amazing innovation in hunting strategies,” said Dr. Scott Byram, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
“This distinctive Indigenous technology is providing a window into hunting and survival techniques used for millennia throughout much of the world.”
The team’s findings may help solve a puzzle that has fueled decades of debate in archaeology circles: how did communities in North America actually use Clovis points, which are among the most frequently unearthed items from the Ice Age?
Named for the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where the shaped stones were first recovered nearly a century ago, Clovis points were shaped from rocks, such as chert, flint or jasper.
They range from the size of a person’s thumb to that of a midsize iPhone and have a distinct, razor-sharp edge and fluted indentations on both sides of their base.
Thousands of them have been recovered across the United States — some have even been unearthed within preserved mammoth skeletons.
“Clovis points are often the only recovered part of a spear,” said University of California, Berkeley’s Dr. Jun Sunseri.
“The intricately designed bone shafts at the end of the weapon are sometimes found, but the wood at the base of the spear and the pine pitch and lacing that help make them function as a complete system have been lost to time.”
“Plus, research silos limit that kind of systems thinking about prehistoric weaponry. And if stone specialists aren’t experts in bone, they might not see the full picture.”
“You have to look beyond the simple artifact. One of the things that’s key here is that we’re looking at this as an engineered system that requires multiple kinds of sub-specialties within our field and other fields.”
Building tools as strong, effective systems was likely a priority for communities 13,000 years ago
The tools needed to be resilient. The people had a limited number of suitable rocks to work with while traversing the land.
They might go hundreds of miles without access to the right kind of long, straight poles from which to fashion a spear.
“So it stands to reason they wouldn’t want to risk throwing or destroying their tools without knowing if they’d even land the animal,” Dr. Byram said.
“People who are doing metal military artifact analysis know all about it because it was used for stopping horses in warfare.”
“But prior to that, and in other contexts with boar hunting or bear hunting, it wasn’t very well known.”
“It’s a theme that comes back in literature quite a bit. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t been talked about too much in anthropology.”
To evaluate their pike hypothesis, the researchers built a test platform measuring the force a spear system could withstand before the point snapped and/or the shaft expanded.
Their low-tech, static version of an animal attack using a braced, replica Clovis point spear allowed them to test how different spears reached their breaking points and how the expansion system responded.
It was based on prior experiments where researchers fired stone-tipped spears into clay and ballistics gel — something that might feel like a pinprick to a 9-ton mammoth.
“The kind of energy that you can generate with the human arm is nothing like the kind of energy generated by a charging animal. It’s an order of magnitude different,” Dr. Jun said.
“These spears were engineered to do what they’re doing to protect the user.”
“The sophisticated Clovis technology that developed independently in North America is testimony to the ingenuity and skills that early Indigenous people employed in their cohabitation of the ancient landscape with now-extinct megafauna,” said University of California, Berkeley’s Professor Kent Lightfoot.
The team’s results appear in the journal PLoS ONE.
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R.S. Byram et al. 2024. Clovis points and foreshafts under braced weapon compression: Modeling Pleistocene megafauna encounters with a lithic pike. PLoS ONE 19 (8): e0307996; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0307996
This article is a version of a press-release provided by the University of California, Berkeley.
