About those atlatls

[Bill in Oregon]

Thought I would post in a separate topic rather than at the tail of my post of a photo of levergunners in the Northwest.
This weapon system is fascinating and a lot of fun to try to replicate.
This source, one of many on the Web, suggests that the atlatl was the primary piercing projectile system in the Americas from 15,000 years ago, to about 1,500, when the bow and arrow made it to our shores.
I have enjoyed making and using these tools for many years now. My biggest current challenge is finding good dart materials. Back in Oregon, I would go up into the Cascade Mountains near Crater Lake and harvest dart shafts from the abundant red osier dogwoods that choke the creeks and wet meadows in that country. The dogwood shoots had wonder natural tapers and when peeled, were easily straightened.

https://basketmakeratlatl.com/?page_id=1436

Here is a site with lots of different styles of atlatls. Just for the heck of it, I made the Kuskokwim throwing board and it was much less comfortable for me to use than the simple basketmaker style.

http://www.thudscave.com/npaa/designs/

[Grizz]

thanks for posting this. it's a wonder, isn't it, how primitive cave dwelling stone age people could figure out how to multiply their strengths 50 some thousand years ago. I mean, how would somebody accidentally discover how to chuck spears that way? I suppose it could be an offshoot of baseball

[JimT]

It quite possible that those who came before were quite intelligent and figured out how to do a lot of things we haven't even thought of.

[Bill in Oregon]

Jim, I would love to sit down over beers with the Neanderthal guys ...
I am proud of my Neanderthal DNA.

[Ysabel Kid]

It quite possible that those who came before were quite intelligent and figured out how to do a lot of things we haven't even thought of.

+1

I'd certainly put them up against the snowflake gender-confused half-wits we have now!

[octagon]

Bill I've been considering hunting pigs with spears for some time having suggested to my Brother we use spears from 4 wheelers and try and get after some. He figured that with beer likely being involved the probability of getting hurt was high and we were too old to fall going that fast. I made some knives last year and started thinking about spears again, and have been re reading "Hunting Weapons" by Blackmore 1971 for inspiration. I have some blade material and an old pal with a full on knife shop...surely too good of an idea to turn loose of.

[Grizz]

Spear hunting hogs sounds exciting. I have some 5160 and spears and bowies and adzes and scorps are all simple with socket tangs.

Is there a contingent of Texans hunting hogs with bowies? Thought I read something about it...

[wvfarrier]

My buddy, ryan gill, killed a buffalo with an atlatl

[rossim92]

Jim, I would love to sit down over beers with the Neanderthal guys ...
I am proud of my Neanderthal DNA.

I bet they would like ipa beer! ( I don't, too strong of an aftertaste. I like coors light and bud light, in that order)

[Pitchy]

I broke out a bunch of mine about a month ago and couldn`t throw worth a darn, must be to stiff.
It is cool stuff.

[Bill in Oregon]

Octagon, it appears you have the resources to put together some serious spear-hunting kit. I think the biggest challenge would be getting close enough.
Grizz, for some reason 5160 popped into my head the minute I read Octagon's post. Tim Lively sings its praises in his classic video "Knifemaking Unplugged." Think his source was a leaf spring from a 1959 Ford pickup.
There is an Argentine Army surgeon named Dr. Juan Pozzi who for years has held boar hunts down there with his Argentine Dogos -- one on each ear while the client deploys either knife or spear. Pretty intense!
The AKC recognized the Dogo breed in 2020 ...
https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/dogo-argentino/

[Grizz]

Octagon, it appears you have the resources to put together some serious spear-hunting kit. I think the biggest challenge would be getting close enough.
Grizz, for some reason 5160 popped into my head the minute I read Octagon's post. Tim Lively sings its praises in his classic video "Knifemaking Unplugged." Think his source was a leaf spring from a 1959 Ford pickup.
There is an Argentine Army surgeon named Dr. Juan Pozzi who for years has held boar hunts down there with his Argentine Dogos -- one on each ear while the client deploys either knife or spear. Pretty intense!
The AKC recognized the Dogo breed in 2020 ...
https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/dogo-argentino/

thanks Bill. this is the first blade i forged after watching Tim's video. it was an Old leaf spring under daughter's boat shed. used a splitting wedge lodged in a firewood round as the anvil. it's a souvenir and won't be heat treated . . .
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[Bill in Oregon]

Grizz, you did a wonderful job on that blade! Good to know there is another Tim Lively fan here.

[4t5]

Ryan Gill..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjLn-OW35vY&t=110s

[octagon]

Grizz that is a cool spear! I have six ft of 1095. That guy in the vid is whipping through that skinning with that flake, cool.
Bill, getting close to the pigs is a problem, but here is where you come in and tie this plan together!

late at night my Bro and I will get 20 yards downwind of you, while you call em in, making lonely,sexy pig noises...we will come in for the kill before the foreplay is over This plan is contingent
on you having no serious religious convictions that might preclude participation in such a soiree...some moral flexibility might be a plus

[wvfarrier]

I made this spear for a Grizzly hunt that got quashed 2 years ago by Covid. Blade is made from 5160, 14" sharpened edge, 8" tang and 5" guard. The shaft is hickory. I also wrapped it with fiber glass and epoxy, over 6 brass pins. Its shaving sharp.

[Bill in Oregon]

Octagon, I am not sure about this plan of yours ...
WVfarrier, that spear looks absolutely wicked!

[CowboyTutt]

Had the spear tip made for me from a guy in Ukraine. I had him engrave it with "Slava Ukrainia" on one side and "Hyram Slava" on the other in Cyrillic (Glory to Ukraine, and its heros). I didn't like the shaft it came with, so I ordered up a staff made of Ipe wood (South African form of iron wood 3xs harder than red oak) and had my woodshop teacher friend fit the tip deep into the spear shaft then drill the spear tip and shaft all the way through and pin and peen a mild steel shaft through the whole arrangement. It's ready for duty! It's also made of spring steel. -Tutt

[AJMD429]

It quite possible that those who came before were quite intelligent and figured out how to do a lot of things we haven't even thought of.

+1

I'd certainly put them up against the snowflake gender-confused half-wits we have now!

Yep...!!!

[Grizz]

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Rangers-Spear.jpeg

.this is the spear i generally have in the truck. it's pressed sheet metal, very light for its size, and though it's not a hurling type spear, it sticks in the things i throw it at.
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ColdSteel-13 inch edge.jpeg

.don't know how well it will hold its edge. haven't gone "forged-in-fire" on it. as far as a thrusting tool, i reckon it can go clean through a torso and sever the spine on the way out.
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Slick-and-cousin.jpeg

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these are the socket tangs i prefer for these kind of tools. the blade on the slick is six inches long to the edge. the blade on the shorty is about three and a quarter inches, by two, by a quarter inch 5160 spring steel. The smaller one was started as an adze, but it could be most anything. it could forge out to seven inches or so as a knife, or maybe eight as a spear, or perhaps only five if profiled as a leaf shape. The tang on the slick is just over five inches long. had to make a hard charcoal trench fire because my gas forge is too small.

hopefully i can return to blade work when i get the larger projects advanced far enough. nobody told me retirement is so tiring!

GN Shooters

[CowboyTutt]

Looks very good Grizz! Looks like you did a good strong 2 pin mount on the spear head too. I worry about some of the mounting options people are using. Mine originally just came with a wood screw from one side. Not nearly strong enough for real world use if you ask me. -Tutt

[Mike Armstrong]

I have a Mexican friend who speaks Nahua, the Mexican language spoken by the Mexica, the people we call Aztecs and still spoken by about a million people from Mexico to San Salvador. Atlatl is derived from their language. Unfortunately (or maybe not) it has several sounds that are VERY common in Nahua, but don't really exist in English or Spanish. "Tl" is one of them. It is pronounced sort of like the "ot" in hot. That makes "atlatl" into something like "ot-tot" with the emphasis on the second "ot". Still with me?

The Mexica (meh-shee-kah) thought that the atlatl was the only missile weapon that real civilized people used, since they, like the Romans in Italy, wanted to be thought of as the real inventors of civilization in the Americas, and chose the classic old standby of the civilizations before them, their "Eagle" and "Jaguar" knights scorning the "newly arrived" bow and arrow except for hunting. But when they later found that they needed to deal with surrounding "barbarians," they turned to barbarian mercenaries and their bows and arrows for longer range warfare; a tribe of "chichimeca" or "dog people" called the Otomi, who are STILL proud of their "imperial sniper service!"

Atlatl darts were great for piercing native boiled cotton and wood plate armor, but they didn't cut Toledo steel.

[Grizz]

Mike,

Still with me?

Yes but,

you had me at "barbarians" because,
so far, every language group i have read about always calls the surrounding peoples barbarians, and treats them like dogs. greek and roman cultures, and inuit, and tlingit, etc. refer to themselves as "the people", and everyone else as "the barbarians". [obviously not a complete inventory]

the roman culture known as spaniards, bringing their contempory version of latin to the "new" world, mixed up languages into a hodge-podge alphabet soup. i've met guatamalan men who are apparently related to the indigenous peoples, who vehemently deny any such association and consider themselves of spanish descent, which of course they are. they are both.

I am interested in your knowledge and would appreciate a link or two to any sites tasked with simplifying Nahua structurally, and spoken conversations for my failing hearing.

Are there dialects of Nahua over the geographical range of the speakers? is the current spoken language identical to the historic written versions? It seems amazing to me that they have preserved their heart language for over a thousand years.

I think 'otot' will not find its way into our conversations, but i am glad you explained it.

grizz

[Mike Armstrong]

Grizz, I'm no linguist; most of my "facts" are heresay. I do know that Nahua, also called Nahuatl (pronounced "Nah-WOT") is a member of a HUGE language family that is usually called "Uto-Aztecan," and was originally present from about the Arctic Circle to near Panama. The vast majority of the--probably--thousands of dialects are extinct now. Nahua is spoken mainly in Mexico and centered where it started, in the Valley of Mexico, but has several dialects, some of them marginally understandable by people far from each other. The Nahua speakers in El Salvador were virtually exterminated in a genocide in the 1930s called "La Matanza."

You're so right about "barbarians." We ALL are. And everyone that ISN'T US is too! I think the word came from Greek and they applied it to just about everyone who wasn't Greek. That habit was picked up by everyone worldwide it seems. Certainly the various native American "empires" had the concept, and to the Maya, the Aztecs were just "northern barbarians," and the Aztecs apparently felt the same about them.

Nahua speakers are not appreciated in Central America (apparently especially in El Salvador....). Part of that is because Mexicans who spoke various forms of the language spent a lot of time over the millenia trying to conquer the cultures in Southern Mexico and Central America. Sometimes they succeeded for a few centuries, and the feeling that northerners were the perpetual enemy stuck.

My Spanish contains a lot of "mejicanismos" and they really aren't appreciated in Guatemala! Guatemalans resent Mexicans for "pre-historic historical reasons" and historical ones too. The "Spanish" armies that conquered Guatemala were largely made up of Mexican warriors supplemented by Spanish technology. The Aztec Eagle Knights got enlisted to fight against their traditional southern enemies, and they did!

And in the 1840s the same Mexican villain (Gen. Santa Ana) we fought against in the Mexican War invaded Guatemala and grabbed about a third of that country from them. I know that the language is still taught in Mexican Universities' linguistic courses. I leave them to it--can't say a single sentence correctly, and it makes my mouth hurt!

I'm rambling on and should shut up. I will look and ask around for sources of Nahua language learning and get back to you by PM. The whole deal of ethnic identity down there (and in Latino USA) interests and bewilders me too.

Mike Armstrong

[Grizz]

Thanks MIke.

the short answer to "can't we all hold hands and sing kumbaya and get along" is NO. NO WAY.

it is one of the most stupefying social observations, the simultaneous coalescing of the surviving peoples and the and the anonymization of every one stripped of every vestige of themselves.

mortal enemies, like soux and apaches and comanches now banded together to celebrate their survival i suppose, and the fairytail theory that someone can change the sex ID in every cell with a scapal.

the more ancient survivors in central and south america were also mortal enemies and nearly exterminated themselves in their murderous attempt to placate their murderous gods, that were, remarkably, identical to themselves.

i tend to ramble. thanks for the response

insane is as insane does.