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The Megalithic Portal and Megalith Map : Index >> Stones Forum >> Experimental Archaeology
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AuthorExperimental Archaeology
bat400



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 Posted 07-02-2018 at 17:07   
Practical Modern Experiments to Replicate or Test how our ancient ancestors did the things they did.
After reading the article below I decided to start a thread on this subject in general (for items without a link to a particular site) and simply as a repository on the subject.




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bat400



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 Posted 07-02-2018 at 17:13   
Stone Age man’s top tips for felling prey

Janice Wood notches an arrow to her bow and lets it fly at a fresh reindeer carcass. The tip hits home and sinks into the flesh with a satisfying thud.

It is no ordinary arrowhead. Fashioned from a carefully ground caribou antler and bristling with tiny but wickedly sharp chips of the volcanic rock obsidian it is a weapon that has not been wielded for at least 8,000 years. And in Ms Wood’s opinion, it may be a more effective instrument of death than the broadhead arrows used by modern hunters.

With her former professor at the University of Washington, the anthropology graduate has laboriously recreated the projectiles used by the Stone Age Alaskans. The prehistoric people were sophisticated killers who switched between three kinds of weapon depending on the animal they were aiming at. Ms Wood, an amateur hunter, is so impressed with the deep, jagged, lacerating cuts inflicted by the obsidian microblades that she will try them on live prey such as a brown bear.


Towards the end of the Palaeolithic period, as early humans crossed the Bering Strait and fanned out into North America, they hunted reindeer and other animals with spears or darts cast from a throwing stick called an atlatl.

Archaeologists have found at least three different tips on these projectiles: narrow, bodkin-like heads made from bone or antler, pear-shaped flaked stone points that are more like modern arrowheads, and the antler-obsidian composites.

Ms Wood and Ben Fitzhugh, an authority on the prehistoric hunters of the north Pacific rim, reconstructed the tips as faithfully as they could.

The microblades were easy, she said, but “many miles” went into gathering the antlers and then boiling and carving had its risks. “A lot of blood went into this project,” she added.

She then fired the projectiles into blocks of ballistic gelatin, a jelly-like substance used to simulate flesh in firearms tests, and into the cadaver of a newly culled reindeer on a farm near her home in Fairbanks, Alaska.

The results, published in the journal Journal of Archaeological Science, 31 Jan 2018
, demonstrate that each point may have had a different purpose, specific to a particular prey, a little like the wide variety of modern bullet tips.

Source: The Times of London.




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bat400



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 Posted 07-02-2018 at 17:20   
Link Associated with the Experimental Archaeology Conference, held in a different city each year.

https://experimentalarchaeology.org.uk/

and Neolithic experiments in the past: http://www.megalithic.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=Forum&file=viewtopic&topic=7412&forum=1




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bat400



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 Posted 07-02-2018 at 17:34   
Other Threads in Forum:

Prehistoric Flint and Stone Axe / Lithics thread.

Bronze Age Axes, Swords and other Implements / Weapons.

How Beer Gave Us Civilization.

Archeologists burn pigs to investigate historical mystery.








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Andy B



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 Posted 08-02-2018 at 11:51   
Thanks Mary , funnily enough I just saw this talk - Marlow is a few miles West of London in Buckinghamshire

ADVENTURES IN EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Date and time: 22 Mar 2018 - 20:00
Location: Garden Room, Liston Hall, Chapel Street, Marlow SL7 1DD
Speaker: Dr Jennifer Foster
Organised by: AIM
Cost: AIM and MAS members £3, Visitors £4.50
Experimental archaeology looks at all aspects and periods of archaeology, from artefacts to buildings and landscape. We ask questions of the archaeological data which are difficult to interpret from the excavated evidence alone, such as: how long would it take to chop down trees with a stone axe? What was this building used for? Jennifer will be looking particularly at some experiments carried out with students at the University of Reading based on excavations of prehistoric sites. She will bring some of the artefacts created by the experiments to the talk.

http://www.archaeologyinmarlow.org.uk/upcoming-events/adventures-in-experimental-archaeology/





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