There were at least four waves of bow and arrow use in northern North America. These occurred at 12000, 4500, 2400, and after about 1300 years ago.
Earliest bows in Americas were used 10200 to 6800 BC by the Denali Tradition people - an ephemeral group related to but distinct from the Amerindians who crossed from Siberia to Americas after them. They were replaced by Northern Archaic Tradition People.
4500 BP
2800-2500 BC the Na Dene people crossed the Bering Straits into Americas as Arctic Small Tool Tradition & reintroduced the bow. They gave up bows & adopted lifestyles of their Amerindian subjects by 500 BC at latest, gradually adapting to hunt sea mammals.
After 4,000 years with little evidence of the bow and arrow (and scholars have tried to find it), the entire arctic was colonized by peoples simultaneously using both technologies. The Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt) is a well-described early arctic manifestation that spread eastward from Bering Strait around 4,500 years ago.
Most evidence of the bow and arrow during the ASTt is in the form of microlithic end blades (Fig. 2a), but in a few well-preserved sites, such as Qeqertasussuk, a frozen site in western Greenland, bow fragments have also been found. These are often associated with caribou or musk ox hunting. But from the North Pacific to Greenland, in all cases where there is evidence of both caribou hunting and sea mammal hunting, the atlatl was also used 27.28 with large sealing harpoons and atlatl(=spear thrower) parts found in many contexts.
By 3,500 years ago, the bow and arrow were no longer used in Alaska. This was a period when there appears to have been a reduction in terrestrial fauna, especially caribou, and interior sites are rare. There are also few sites on the northern and western coasts, and the few that do exist were used by sea mammal hunters. The northern Archaic
Inuit invasion
Inuits crossed Bering Straits into Americas around 400 BCE, reintroducing bow to Americas for third time. Their bows and arrows were solely for warfare. The arrowheads were too narrow to reliably kill any mammal other than man.
There is no evidence of the bow and arrow between 3,600 and 2,400 years ago in Alaska, but several remarkable transformations took place after this time. For one, the “fishtail” point was developed on the Alaska Peninsula.31,32 These long, thin, narrow projectiles (Fig. 2b) appear to have been used for conflict. As Workman stated 45 years ago, these fragile end blades would not have been useful for any large mammal except people.
Asian war complex
700 CE the Asian War Complex appeared in Aleutians and rapidly spread across the far north of Americas. It was associated with recurved bows, arrows made from bone or copper rather than stone, increase in social complexity (without increase in economic complexity), & fortification.
By 1,000-200 years ago, there is extensive evidence of conflict from the Bering Sea to arctic Alaska and across Canada to Greenland (Fig. 5). This co-occured with the transition to large corporate households on the north Pacific rim (Fig. 6), where social complexity arose before any evidence of economic complexity. This is seen primarily in house-floor areas, which serve as a proxy measure for differential household size, the first archeological measure of social differentiation. This is seen primarily in house-floor areas, which serve as a proxy measure for differential household size, the first archeological measure of social differentiation.
Late state
But to understand the role of the bow and arrow in the north, one must begin in the eighteenth century, when the Russians first arrived in the Aleutian Islands. At that time, the Aleut were using both the atlatl and dart(spear thrower - YT) and the bow and arrow’ (Fig. 1). This is significant for two particular and important reasons.
- First, there are few historic cases in which both technologies were used concurrently;
- second, the bow and arrow in the Aleutian Islands were used almost exclusively in warfare.
The atlatl was a critical technology because the bow and arrow are useless for hunting sea mammals. One cannot launch an arrow from a kayak because it is too unstable and requires that both hands remain on a paddle. To use an atlatl, it is necessary only to stabilize the kayak with a paddle on one side and launch the atlatl dart with the opposite hand.
The Aleut on the Alaska Peninsula did indeed use the bow and arrow to hunt caribou there. However, in the 1,400 km of the Aleutian Islands, there are no terrestrial mammals except humans and the bow was reserved almost exclusively for conflicts among them.
- Inuits would make snowmen for archery target practice