Speaker 1: Get value.
Speaker 2: You can't argue with at Tesco with their amazing club
Speaker 2: card prices. Have the perfect night in with their finest
Speaker 2: frozen pizza meal deal. Get the finest frozen pizza, chips
Speaker 2: and ice cream all for six zuo. Like our delicious
Speaker 2: spicy salami, hot honey, and do you or Margarito wood
Speaker 2: fired pizzas served up with their crispy junkie chips and
Speaker 2: ice cream like se sil de caramel or pistaggio for dessert.
Speaker 2: Can't argue with that shop in store or online. Tesco.
Speaker 2: Every Little helps available in most stores. Prices very in express.
Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's that tattered Halloween wig. You know he's
Speaker 1: going to come in handy someday. Alli ward back with
Speaker 1: another episode of Alergies. Okay, this one's big. If you
Speaker 1: have come to rely on ologies for very detailed, very
Speaker 1: weird information about stuff that you never knew existed and
Speaker 1: some historical gossip and strangers unbridled passions making you feel
Speaker 1: okay about being alive. Hot diggity damn, this is an
Speaker 1: episode that you may just cherish forever. So hop of
Speaker 1: the jeep.
Speaker 3: Heg tight.
Speaker 1: This is about to be a journey. Okay, but first,
Speaker 1: a few thanks thank you to everyone in the Patreon
Speaker 1: club for supporting it like a dollar a month or
Speaker 1: more that gets you in. You can summit questions to
Speaker 1: the Ologists before we record. Bonus. If your questions didn't
Speaker 1: get answered here in this episode, our guest this week
Speaker 1: went back and answered them all personally, which was just
Speaker 1: magical of him. Thank you to everyone who tells friends
Speaker 1: about the show, and who subscribes and rates and of
Speaker 1: course reviews the show. It matters more than you know.
Speaker 1: It keeps us up in the charts, and I read
Speaker 1: them all and then, like a crisp chilli pickle, I
Speaker 1: select a fresh one to save each week, such as
Speaker 1: this week. Natty Daddy Light says, I live and work
Speaker 1: at a state park, what with little to no internet access,
Speaker 1: So every week I drive thirty minutes to the nearest
Speaker 1: town and very creepily sit outside a coffee shop in
Speaker 1: my car, poaching the Wi Fi. The owner and I
Speaker 1: have an understanding so I can download the latest episode
Speaker 1: of Ologies, and says, firstly and foremostly Alli Ward has
Speaker 1: been my father all along. Yes that's true, and b
Speaker 1: there's so much I don't know, but the best way
Speaker 1: to overcome all of the not knowing is to ask
Speaker 1: stupid questions. So Natty Daddy light my child, and to
Speaker 1: everyone who left a review, I read it with my heart.
Speaker 1: Thank you for letting me Internet Dad, you all with
Speaker 1: weird facts and advice. Okay, experimental archaeology. Experiment comes from
Speaker 1: the root, meaning to try or to risk, and archaeology
Speaker 1: comes from the root for ancient things. So experimental archaeology
Speaker 1: is to risk ancient things, which sounds dicey, but that's
Speaker 1: not really what it means. So you'll see. Now, this
Speaker 1: ologist and I have been Twitter friends for a while.
Speaker 1: He tweeted at me a few years back about wanting
Speaker 1: to be on the show and fun fact, I almost
Speaker 1: showed up at his house unannounced, like a year ago
Speaker 1: and just shoved a mic in his face to surprise him.
Speaker 1: But I figured that's probably technically illegal. And we have
Speaker 1: had to reschedule this interview probably five times in the
Speaker 1: last month just because of traveling to be up here
Speaker 1: with my folks. I had my own weird er trip
Speaker 1: involving an infected spider bite that turned out probably just
Speaker 1: to be an infected scratch from carrying firewood. We don't
Speaker 1: need to talk about it. Also, my laptop screen shattered
Speaker 1: this week, so I have rescheduled this person over and over.
Speaker 1: But he was so understanding and such a joy, and
Speaker 1: we just chatted about everything from the first tools to
Speaker 1: bows and arrows to spear throwers aka at lattels. And
Speaker 1: if you don't know what an at lottle is or
Speaker 1: how to say it, that's fine. That means this is
Speaker 1: going to f you up even better. So in the
Speaker 1: history of ologies, I have never met anyone so passionate
Speaker 1: about a thing. And it just goes to show you
Speaker 1: that though this person is an undergrad his level of
Speaker 1: knowledge and engagement in the field makes him likely one
Speaker 1: of the top experts in the world on this one
Speaker 1: particular item. It's astounding. So get ready to stand and
Speaker 1: to learn about early human axes, indigenous populations of North
Speaker 1: and Central and South America, tales of fieldwork, some new
Speaker 1: archaeology heroes, tools versus weapons, what to do if you
Speaker 1: find artifacts on a hike, and the physics of how
Speaker 1: far you can lob ancient weaponry with member of the
Speaker 1: board of Directors of the World at Lattle Association, which
Speaker 1: you'll understand and know how to pronounce by the end
Speaker 1: of this episode, experimental archaeologist Angelo Robletto.
Speaker 3: I am very honored to even be on your radar,
Speaker 3: and even more honored to be on this podcast. It
Speaker 3: has been probably the number one professional goal of mine
Speaker 3: for two year. Really, I distinctly remember I tweeted, I
Speaker 3: wish I could just get my PhD tomorrow for the
Speaker 3: sole purpose of being a guest on Ologies. Oh, I'm
Speaker 3: shookth that's what I shook.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited to have you on because it's as
Speaker 1: soon as you told me what you were into a
Speaker 1: I was like a wattle wattle. I had no idea,
Speaker 1: and then I put you on a list like immediately,
Speaker 1: and can you tell me a little bit, like where
Speaker 1: are you studying right now? What is your research about?
Speaker 3: Okay, so right now I am an undergraduate student. I'm
Speaker 3: going into my senior year. I'm a double major in
Speaker 3: anthropology and philosophy at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Speaker 3: Within anthropology, which is especially in American universities, a broad
Speaker 3: category the study of humanity. Basically, there's four subfields. One
Speaker 3: of those subfields is archaeology. My specialization or my focus
Speaker 3: within anthropology is archaeology, and then my focus within philosophy
Speaker 3: is political theory, but that's completely different. I bounced around
Speaker 3: a few labs at U and LV. What's great about
Speaker 3: that university is that they have a designated building for
Speaker 3: archaeology laboratories. And most people think, like, well, why does
Speaker 3: an archaeologist need a laboratory. They're digging in the field
Speaker 3: they you know, it's not something that most people associate
Speaker 3: with Archaeology is in lab work, but UNLV invested heavily
Speaker 3: in I think there are I want to say twelve
Speaker 3: or fifteen separate designated archaeology laboratories for different fields of archaeology,
Speaker 3: different material specialties, different regional specialties. So one of those
Speaker 3: labs is an experimental archaeology lab, and I've been working
Speaker 3: with that lab since I was in high school. Actually,
Speaker 3: my sophomore year of high school, I was talking to
Speaker 3: my school counselor and she goes, Angela, what do you
Speaker 3: want to do with life? And I said, well, you know,
Speaker 3: since i've been since first or second grade, I have
Speaker 3: written down that I've wanted to be an experimental archaeologist
Speaker 3: when I grew up.
Speaker 1: And how did you earn words?
Speaker 3: Oh, it's crazy. I mean I've wanted to be an
Speaker 3: archaeologist since kindergarten. That was the first I mean, I
Speaker 3: fell in love started with Egyptology. You know. Shout out
Speaker 3: to missus Drake, who's my elementary school librarian, who noticed
Speaker 3: that I I really liked a fiction book about Egypt.
Speaker 3: So she said, well, there's these nonfiction books about Egypt.
Speaker 3: And I had no clue what nonfiction was. And there
Speaker 3: are picture books filled with, you know, pictures of daily
Speaker 3: life in Egypt, and I just fell in love. And
Speaker 3: I quickly moved on to other cultures and civilizations around
Speaker 3: the world. But by first or second grade, I knew
Speaker 3: that ancient tools and weapons were you know, what I
Speaker 3: was most interested in and wanted to study the most.
Speaker 3: But anyway, in high school, I told my counselor, and
Speaker 3: I want to do experimental archaeology, and she goes, well,
Speaker 3: did you know that one of the students here is
Speaker 3: the daughter of the experimental archaeology professor at UNLV. No. Way,
Speaker 3: I mean, one of the odds of this happening. You know,
Speaker 3: there's way My high school had three thousand, three hundred
Speaker 3: students and it is in the fifth largest school district
Speaker 3: in the country, with you know, there's like sixty high
Speaker 3: schools in Las Vegas, and I was at the one
Speaker 3: with the daughter from the experinal archaeology professor at U
Speaker 3: and LV, so she put me in contact with her.
Speaker 3: The professor's name was doctor Karen Harry, and she specializes
Speaker 3: in experimental pottery work. However, she has a graduate students
Speaker 3: who are doing experimental you know, leather tanning work and
Speaker 3: architectural work and stuff like that. But she's a ceramicist
Speaker 3: and she specializes in ancestral Puebloan sites in northern Arizona,
Speaker 3: in the shipwoodz Plateau area part of Paraschant National Monument
Speaker 3: in northern Arizona, kind of the north room of the
Speaker 3: Grand Canyon. And I emailed her and I said, I've
Speaker 3: been obsessed with experimental archaeology and archaeology since I was little.
Speaker 3: You know, I'll come clean test tubes for you, I'll
Speaker 3: do whatever. I just want to be in the environment.
Speaker 3: And she said, well, me and three grad students are
Speaker 3: going off into the desert for a month this summer.
Speaker 3: Would you like to come with us?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: And my god, of course my parents were like, I
Speaker 3: don't know about that, but they eventually said yes. After
Speaker 3: meeting her, and it was myself, doctor Harry, and three
Speaker 3: of her PhD students, our master's and PhD students, And
Speaker 3: we stayed out in a National Park Service cabin out
Speaker 3: in the ship's plateau. And then every day we had
Speaker 3: to get into a pickup truck and barrel over boulders.
Speaker 3: It would take us maybe and like maybe forty five
Speaker 3: minutes to drive like three miles, because that's how slow
Speaker 3: we were going it was. We probably could have walked faster,
Speaker 3: we had so much equipment we didn't want to do that.
Speaker 3: Once we would park, we then have to hike another
Speaker 3: like hour and fifteen minutes. Now this is in June
Speaker 3: in Arizona. It's one hundred and fifteen degrees. We've got,
Speaker 3: you know, between thirty and fifty pound packs on us
Speaker 3: with the gear and stuff like that.
Speaker 4: Ooh, I've a little grimy and sweaty here.
Speaker 3: But once we got to the site, it was magnificent.
Speaker 3: I mean it was The site itself was just kind
Speaker 3: of you couldn't really tell it. It was a sit
Speaker 3: unless New York you're looking for, because this was at
Speaker 3: a time when people they weren't living in one place
Speaker 3: necessarily the whole time. They weren't investing a lot into
Speaker 3: their architecture kind of the beginnings of the pueblo and
Speaker 3: culture in that area that built those kind of big
Speaker 3: like mesa Verne type places.
Speaker 1: Okay, quick aside. I was not sure what mesa Verde
Speaker 1: type places were, but I looked it up, and in
Speaker 1: mesa Verde National Park near the Four Corners, there's a
Speaker 1: series of cliff dwellings like Cliff Palace, and that's in
Speaker 1: almost a thousand year old, gorgeous complex, ancient pueblo in
Speaker 1: structure built into this jaggy, rocky cliff side. And if
Speaker 1: you look up pictures of Cliff Palace and don't gasp,
Speaker 1: you should call a doctor.
Speaker 3: So we get to this area and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is interesting because it's not exactly what I was picturing.
Speaker 3: But they're like, oh yeah, here's a house here, and
Speaker 3: here's another pit house over here. And I'm like, sure
Speaker 3: if you tell it, if you say so, because it
Speaker 3: just looks like pile of rocks to me. At that time,
Speaker 3: I didn't know what I was looking at. But the
Speaker 3: site was situated basically at the rim of the Grand Canyon,
Speaker 3: in a place inaccessible unless you're an archaeologist working on
Speaker 3: the site basically, so we are able to have our
Speaker 3: lunch kind of just perch there in the north rim
Speaker 3: of the Grand Canyon. It was just beautiful. And she
Speaker 3: says she's brought out one other like younger student out
Speaker 3: to that trip and they after the first two or
Speaker 3: three days, they're like, you know, what archaeology is not
Speaker 3: for me. I had the exact opposite reaction. I was completely,
Speaker 3: you know, fully invested after the first day, and at
Speaker 3: night at camp we would do experimental archaeology stuff. We'd
Speaker 3: throw out laddles, we'd throw slings, we made aur own
Speaker 3: rope out of yucca, stuff like that, and it was
Speaker 3: just an incredible experience Noice. So that kind of led
Speaker 3: me into working in that experimental archaeology lab. But then
Speaker 3: the last two years or last year and a half,
Speaker 3: I moved over to the lab next Doore, which is
Speaker 3: the paleo Ethnobotany, an ancient agriculture lab. It's run by
Speaker 3: doctor Alan Farahani. So paleo ethnobotany just means old cultural plants,
Speaker 3: so it's any plant remains that were used by humans
Speaker 3: at some point, so it's mostly seeds. They study kind
Speaker 3: of the beginnings of agriculture and the domestication of grains
Speaker 3: in Southwest Asia, specifically in Jordan, and then also separately
Speaker 3: in Armenia as well.
Speaker 1: So Angelo's lab work right now focuses on stone tools
Speaker 1: found in the Jordan area and investigating why they were
Speaker 1: made and used in the period that they date from,
Speaker 1: rather than the more contemporary materials of the time like
Speaker 1: iron and copper. So it's kind of like trying to
Speaker 1: figure out people who love to listen to vinyl it's cool,
Speaker 1: it's intriguing, or people who have a CD collection like
Speaker 1: is that sad? Why are they doing it? Myself included
Speaker 1: so many questions And now when you say experimental archaeology,
Speaker 1: what exactly does that mean? Does that mean how new
Speaker 1: methods are created, how new tools are created? What how
Speaker 1: do you define that?
Speaker 3: So experimental archaeology is the process of recreating ancient technology
Speaker 3: and attempting to use the tools and weapons in order
Speaker 3: to better understand how ancient peoples would have used them
Speaker 3: and how that might have impacted their data life. That's
Speaker 3: kind of one aspect of it, is like the actual
Speaker 3: recreation of the tools and like, okay, well, how hard
Speaker 3: is it to collect we using a psyche made out
Speaker 3: of flint or whatever. The other side of experiment archaeology
Speaker 3: is purposely recreating the tools and then breaking them while
Speaker 3: using them in order to see what that looks like
Speaker 3: in the archaeological record. So, to give an example, we find,
Speaker 3: you know, arrowheads or projectile points. An experimental archaeologist will
Speaker 3: recreate some of those weapons, fire them at let's say
Speaker 3: a pig carcass or a blistic gelatine or something like that.
Speaker 3: And notice how you know, okay, well, what happens when
Speaker 3: you miss. Well, if it hits a rock, it breaks
Speaker 3: this way. If it hits bone, it breaks this way.
Speaker 3: If it hits wood, it breaks this way. And once
Speaker 3: you collect enough data points, you can say, okay, well
Speaker 3: I know for a fact that this arrowhead broke when
Speaker 3: it hit a rock, because I was the one that
Speaker 3: broke it by hitting it against a rock. So then
Speaker 3: you look in the archaeological record to go, hey, well
Speaker 3: here are these two thousand year old arrowheads. Well they
Speaker 3: if they present similar fracture patterns as the ones that
Speaker 3: I found by throwing it against a rock or whatever,
Speaker 3: I know that that's how it was broken by.
Speaker 1: So another thing, an experimental archaeologist might do is build
Speaker 1: old tools like a sickle and then go harvest a
Speaker 1: bunch of wheat with it, and then look at the
Speaker 1: sickle microscopically to see how the blade is worn down
Speaker 1: by the plants or what sheen the plants left on
Speaker 1: the edge. It's literally called sickle sheen to try to
Speaker 1: match markings found microscopically on found ancient blades. So like,
Speaker 1: imagine someone finding your kitchen knife thousands of years from
Speaker 1: now and they're like, bleeplorp, this person loved to use
Speaker 1: a dull butter knife to cut cold pizza. Wow, what
Speaker 1: a queen she must have been royalty. I wish I
Speaker 1: could have hung with her. And then they just use
Speaker 1: traces of my DNA to simulate a hologram of me
Speaker 1: and we'd party. Oh okay, now walk me through a
Speaker 1: little bit of a time line of materials. Because you're
Speaker 1: talking about flint. I know that you have to do
Speaker 1: your own napping of obsidian and things like that, like
Speaker 1: when did humans use different materials where? And how do
Speaker 1: you even wrap your brain around that?
Speaker 3: Oh? I still can't wrap my brain. I probably will
Speaker 3: go to my grave not fully understanding how ancient humans
Speaker 3: figured this out because flintnapping is possibly the hardest thing
Speaker 3: I've ever taught myself to do.
Speaker 1: Napping side note is with a K like canapping, and
Speaker 1: it means to chip away at a rock, which is
Speaker 1: very difficult as opposed to the napping most of us
Speaker 1: have mastered the last few months.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have taught myself a lot of weird skills
Speaker 3: over the years, both related to archaology and not related
Speaker 3: to archaeology, and I've never had to put more effort,
Speaker 3: both mentally and physically into understanding flint napping. And for
Speaker 3: years I could give you a lecture on the fracture
Speaker 3: mechanics and the physics and the geometry behind flintnapping. I
Speaker 3: under stood it on a conceptual level, but when I
Speaker 3: had rock on my hand, I was never able to
Speaker 3: complete an arrowhead. So it kind of just took just
Speaker 3: a lot of practice, but generally to go over the timeline.
Speaker 3: So the oldest stone tools we know about date to
Speaker 3: about three point three million years ago, which was way
Speaker 3: before the human species even existed. Yeah, yeah, crazy crazy.
Speaker 3: These were super rudimentary flakes and choppers. They were not
Speaker 3: sophisticated arrowheads. They were like a rock that had one
Speaker 3: or two flakes broken off of it to then be
Speaker 3: used to chop some wood or chop a bone or
Speaker 3: something like that. Then there's the Homohobilis, which is the
Speaker 3: one of the committed ancestors to Homo sapiens and literally
Speaker 3: means the handyman. Basically, they date to about two point
Speaker 3: three million years ago, and they were the first ones
Speaker 3: to kind of have cohesive stone tool technology called aldowan
Speaker 3: tools is at least that's what we call them. They
Speaker 3: were still pretty simple choppers, but they are similar to
Speaker 3: each other to the point where or we can kind
Speaker 3: of make it a determination that like, okay, this group
Speaker 3: of hominids all created their stone tools in the same process,
Speaker 3: So that shows a little bit of standardization and a
Speaker 3: little bit more complexity to be able to repeat the
Speaker 3: same thing over and over and over. It just they
Speaker 3: stopped being random and it started being planned. And that's
Speaker 3: kind of when we see a little bit of a
Speaker 3: of a mental shift in the hominid species and the
Speaker 3: ability to work out problems like that, and a lot
Speaker 3: of a lot of experiment archaeologists, especially ones that work
Speaker 3: with you know, stone tools that are millions of years
Speaker 3: old kind of point to this complexity as a way
Speaker 3: to analyze how complex the complexity of the tools as
Speaker 3: a way to analyze how complex hominid brains were becoming.
Speaker 3: Oh then, yeah, so it's kind of really cool because
Speaker 3: it takes so much brain power to understand how to
Speaker 3: make these stone tools that it kind of shows that
Speaker 3: they must have had better brain capacity, or at least
Speaker 3: better abstract thinking conceptualization to be able to repeat these
Speaker 3: process to make similar looking tools over and over. Homo
Speaker 3: Erectus is the first homaid species to leave Africa, and
Speaker 3: they do that about two million years ago, and they
Speaker 3: kind of spread all over your rate, mostly Asi actually,
Speaker 3: but they kind of go up southwest Asia and then
Speaker 3: and then east. They make Ashulian hand axes.
Speaker 1: What is an Ashulian axe? You want to ask Google?
Speaker 1: It's okay, I already did that for us babes. It's
Speaker 1: a doozy to spell. So Ashulian is trey Francais. It's
Speaker 1: named after a site in France where some of these
Speaker 1: were found. And if you're thinking hand axe, you're probably
Speaker 1: thinking like a cute hatchet, but a hand axe is
Speaker 1: actually a rock that's been chipped away at one end
Speaker 1: to come to a point and helps cut things. So
Speaker 1: it's like a sharp rock, that's what that is.
Speaker 3: Okay, these are really kind of standardized. So we find
Speaker 3: a lot of these big hand axes that were all
Speaker 3: flaked the same way, that all look the same way.
Speaker 3: So it's you know, at that point, it's a parent
Speaker 3: that these hominids were teaching each other how to replicate
Speaker 3: this tool, and it was part of the same material
Speaker 3: culture where this shape of tool and this kind of
Speaker 3: way of making it was you know, prioritized in some
Speaker 3: way for some reason, and it was important for everyone
Speaker 3: in the community to make them the same way. So
Speaker 3: we find a lot of these Australian hand axes made
Speaker 3: the same way. And what's also important about Australian hand
Speaker 3: axe is that it's flaked on both sides, so it's
Speaker 3: one of the first by face tools. So by face,
Speaker 3: if you look at like a knife edge, it's beveled
Speaker 3: on both edges, so that's by face. And then if
Speaker 3: it's just like a chisel is flat on one end
Speaker 3: and then it's beveled on the other end like a
Speaker 3: wood chisel, that's called a uniface. So most choppers were
Speaker 3: kind of unifacial, they would just have like one striking edge,
Speaker 3: but these Australian hand axes were specifically flaked on both
Speaker 3: sides to give it a byface. By faces are sharper
Speaker 3: because they come out at a steeper angle to the
Speaker 3: edge so that they can be sharper. They can even
Speaker 3: be a lit more durable as well, So byfaces takes
Speaker 3: a lot more skill to make a byface and to
Speaker 3: be able to replicate that same shape over and over
Speaker 3: and over.
Speaker 1: What type of stone were they making these these axes out.
Speaker 3: Of, So the earlier Oldowan tools were kind of river
Speaker 3: pebbles or cobbles. As you get into byfaces, you need
Speaker 3: a stone that's going to be more predictable in its
Speaker 3: flaking pattern. So silicate based crystalline stones like flint or
Speaker 3: obsidian or shirt are really good for that because they
Speaker 3: act almost like glass. They have a uniform, homogeneous crystalline
Speaker 3: structure that allows you to be able to predict how
Speaker 3: the shock waves will interact with the ridges on the
Speaker 3: rock to create tools in a better way. If you
Speaker 3: have a really coarsely grained rock, it's going to break
Speaker 3: an unpredictable pattern and it's not going to lend itself
Speaker 3: to a good tool.
Speaker 1: Okay, how is this person so young and so knowledgeable?
Speaker 1: And also we haven't even go into add lattels. Okay,
Speaker 1: already I'm learning so much.
Speaker 3: Anyway, So then around five hundred thousand years ago, which
Speaker 3: is still before the Homo sapiens species in Africa, as
Speaker 3: kind of the evolutionary lines were branching to what would
Speaker 3: eventually become Homo sapiens, we find the earliest, potentially the
Speaker 3: earliest evidence of hafting. Halfting is when you take a
Speaker 3: stone tool and you affix it to some sort of
Speaker 3: handle or other implement, like a wooden handle or a
Speaker 3: wooden spear, or even like an antler handle. So we
Speaker 3: find the first evidence of hafting. And the way we
Speaker 3: know that is because you look at the mastic, which
Speaker 3: is the glue used on the tool, because obviously the
Speaker 3: wood is rotten away after five hundred thousand years, but
Speaker 3: there's residue of glue on the back of some of
Speaker 3: these tools that were found in Africa, and that indicates
Speaker 3: that they may have been glued into a handle of
Speaker 3: some kind.
Speaker 1: What is the glue? Where are they getting the glue?
Speaker 1: They can't get that on Amazon.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can't get on Amazon, for sure, they would
Speaker 3: make it. It's also called pine pitch, so it's kind
Speaker 3: of a mixture of tree sap, beeswax, wood, ash, and
Speaker 3: fat that would kind of make this really this kind
Speaker 3: of black tar glue. And usually you would glue it
Speaker 3: into a stick or a handle by carving a notch
Speaker 3: into the piece of wood or the bone, slotting the
Speaker 3: byface into that notch, putting the glue around, and then
Speaker 3: usually you tie it with some sort of cordage, whether
Speaker 3: it's made out of animal sinew, which is really strong
Speaker 3: and useful because when it's wet, it's really easy to
Speaker 3: work with. But when it dries it actually has its
Speaker 3: own glue. It shrinks and hardens like a rock. You're
Speaker 3: able to tie something really tight, and then as it dries,
Speaker 3: it literally constricts around that piece and hardens rock solid
Speaker 3: to make it a really really tough you know, tough
Speaker 3: point or tough haft. So they usually tie it as well,
Speaker 3: but sometimes they would just glue it. But the Neanderthals
Speaker 3: came around like four hundred thousand years ago and they
Speaker 3: started making smaller, more specialized tools, and they had the
Speaker 3: malcatarian tool tradition, and the Levolois tools, which I'm probably mispronouncing.
Speaker 3: It's a French term and I'm not great with my French.
Speaker 1: Let's ask a computer la the Venoa tools. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: by the bye, these are like the Ashulian axes aka
Speaker 1: sharpened rocks, but they're more refined, and they're smaller, they're
Speaker 1: more knife like. They look much closer to arrowheads and
Speaker 1: stone points, and I guess they're evidence that our hairy
Speaker 1: ancestors were against some real skills. So think like going
Speaker 1: from a flip phone to an iPhone. It's like, ooh.
Speaker 3: The cool thing about these is that they're able to
Speaker 3: get really really precise sharp flakes. They could repeat over
Speaker 3: and over, and instead of making these big hand axes,
Speaker 3: which were kind of unruly, they got better at making
Speaker 3: by faces on a smaller scale that would work better
Speaker 3: in hand tools. Then we have the earliest. The earliest
Speaker 3: spears we've ever found are the Shehrnangen spears. Now it's
Speaker 3: a German word that I'm sure i'm mispronouncing as well.
Speaker 3: The Shunningen spears I can't remember. You might have to
Speaker 3: look up pronunciation on that.
Speaker 1: It's going and spears it's not helpful.
Speaker 3: But the Shonningen spears, they were a collection of like
Speaker 3: six to seven foot long wooden sticks basically that were
Speaker 3: excavated with a bunch of horse bones from and that
Speaker 3: are dated to about three hundred and eighty thousand years ago,
Speaker 3: so still before Homo sapiens. Yeah, so it's theorized that
Speaker 3: these spears were used as thrusty weapons, but they there's
Speaker 3: a debate about whether or not they could have been
Speaker 3: throwing weapons as well.
Speaker 1: Throwing spears, by the bye are for overhand chucking and
Speaker 1: thrusting is like underhand stabby times. So look at us.
Speaker 1: We're archaeologists now, and the difference between a throwing and
Speaker 1: thrusting is that the crux of what an add a
Speaker 1: little is.
Speaker 3: Yes, I like to use in anemonic that at lattels
Speaker 3: are for throwing and spears are for thrusting. When we're
Speaker 3: talking archaeology, we're talking weapons study. If it is a
Speaker 3: spear that's being thrown without the aid of another tool
Speaker 3: like in a lattle, if it's just being thrown, that's
Speaker 3: a javelin. Okay, spear by itself, just the word spear
Speaker 3: indicates that they thrusting weapon. Oh, if it's being thrown
Speaker 3: by another tool, like in that laddle, then it's called
Speaker 3: a dart, specifically if it has fletchings, which are the
Speaker 3: feathers in the back.
Speaker 1: Okay, so sticky mcpointerson a spear is used to stab
Speaker 1: a javelin is tossed forward, and a dart is tossed
Speaker 1: forward but has fletchings or those featherlike little wings on
Speaker 1: the back. And a twenty nineteen University College London study
Speaker 1: had some collegiate javelin competitors try to throw replicas of
Speaker 1: those heavy German spears to see could these even be
Speaker 1: tossed how far?
Speaker 3: Here's the thing with the extreme t archaeology research. It
Speaker 3: tells you whether things could be possible, but doesn't necessarily
Speaker 3: prove that that's what happened. So the result of their
Speaker 3: research was, Okay, it is possible to throw these spears,
Speaker 3: but that doesn't mean that Neanderthals were throwing the spears.
Speaker 3: Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 3: Yes, So they found that even with these collegiate train
Speaker 3: javelin throwers that anything beyond fifteen meters they weren't able
Speaker 3: to hit the target at all, and after twenty meters
Speaker 3: the spear wouldn't even land point first. It kind of
Speaker 3: fishtail in the air. And this is for a couple
Speaker 3: of reasons. One, the body mechanics of throwing a spear
Speaker 3: like a javelin with a flat trajectory aiming for a
Speaker 3: target isn't really conducive for the human body. Javelin throwers,
Speaker 3: like Olympic javelin throwers, they're throwing at an extremely high
Speaker 3: art to throw for distance, and it works okay for that.
Speaker 3: But even those javelin throwers, if you asked them to
Speaker 3: try to hit a standing target twenty meters in front
Speaker 3: of them, they would have a lot of difficulty even
Speaker 3: reaching the target, even though they can throw one hundred
Speaker 3: meters when they're throwing for distance. It's just the mechanics
Speaker 3: of throwing at that flat trajectory versus throwing it at
Speaker 3: an extremely steep trajectory are just completely different.
Speaker 1: Angelo says it's pretty hard to toss a heavy spear
Speaker 1: on its own, both far and accurately. So how are
Speaker 1: they getting from A to B?
Speaker 3: And we know that Neanderthals would use hunting tactics where
Speaker 3: they would either like drive animals off a cliff or
Speaker 3: corner animals in like canyons or something like that, to
Speaker 3: where they could be easily accessed with thrusting spears to
Speaker 3: kind of finish off the animal. These spears are the
Speaker 3: oldest complete weapons that we have ever found, and they
Speaker 3: date to about three hundred and eighty thousand years ago.
Speaker 3: But I can't even almost it's crazy. It's crazy how
Speaker 3: that's a time scale that's hard to process because if
Speaker 3: you think about the entire history, of the entirety of
Speaker 3: recorded human history, so you know, history that we have
Speaker 3: like written accounts of by people who had developed written language,
Speaker 3: really only go back a couple thousand years in the
Speaker 3: grand scheme of humanity. But we're talking almost four hundred
Speaker 3: thousand years old. And like I said, these spears were
Speaker 3: found in Germany and they were used by Neanderthals at
Speaker 3: that time. And that's another thing with archaeology. Just because
Speaker 3: you have excravated the oldest example of something doesn't mean
Speaker 3: that's when that thing started, right, That's just the oldest
Speaker 3: one we've found.
Speaker 1: Okay, So for hundreds of thousands of years, these bad
Speaker 1: boys were too heavy to hurl very far. But as
Speaker 1: time marched on, weapons got faster and lighter. In about
Speaker 1: forty five thousand years ago. Anthropologists think that spears emerged
Speaker 1: with a little extra help, which is a spear thrower
Speaker 1: you use in conjunction with it, so it works to
Speaker 1: fling the shafted weapon a lot like the dog toy,
Speaker 1: the chuck it, which hurls spitty tennis balls at the
Speaker 1: dog park. In fact, Angelo says that the chucket is
Speaker 1: a modern at laddle. What is it called an at laddle?
Speaker 1: At a laddle? It's an at laddle, not an adult.
Speaker 3: An at laddle. Well, I say at laddle. The reason
Speaker 3: I don't say at a laddle is because in my
Speaker 3: mind you're pronouncing the middle l twice at laddle. What
Speaker 3: it's actually just spelled atl atl. Now, the word at
Speaker 3: laddle is a Nawatch word, which is the language spoken
Speaker 3: by the group of people in central Mexico that we
Speaker 3: now call the Aztecs, even though that's not what they
Speaker 3: called themselves. The Nahwua people were a collection of people
Speaker 3: from northern Mexico about two thousand years ago who slowly,
Speaker 3: tribe by tribe, immigrated south towards the Valley of Mexico,
Speaker 3: where other civilizations like Tao, ti Wakan and had been
Speaker 3: flourishing in that time period. Now, one of the first
Speaker 3: groups to come down was the Tolltec group, So they
Speaker 3: were a Nahwachi speaking group that came after the fall
Speaker 3: of Tao tu Wakan and kind of established a small
Speaker 3: kingdom or empire in a city called Tula in central Mexico.
Speaker 3: One of the last Nawak speaking tribes to immigrate from
Speaker 3: northern Mexico to Central Mexico was the Meshka tribe. They
Speaker 3: came in and probably were using bows and arrows at
Speaker 3: the time, but at latto's were really popular in that
Speaker 3: central Mexican valley, so they adopted the use of an
Speaker 3: at laddo. They started conquering kind of these other city
Speaker 3: states at the time, and they created a triple alliance
Speaker 3: between two other city states. So it was the Meshica
Speaker 3: tribe and their city state of Tlan and then two
Speaker 3: other tribes with two other states, you know, their own
Speaker 3: city states. They created the Aztec triple alliance. So that's
Speaker 3: who we when we say Aztec, we're actually referring to
Speaker 3: this triple alliance between these three cities, the main group
Speaker 3: of which was the Meshica tribe in the city of
Speaker 3: Street Lane, which is what we now call Mexico City.
Speaker 1: And how long ago is this?
Speaker 3: So that was in the thirteen and fourteen hundreds, so
Speaker 3: so not not too long ago. Then the Spaniards came
Speaker 3: conquered the Aztec and then enslaved and killed them all
Speaker 3: with smallpox and one of the worst genocides in history
Speaker 3: that the Meshica themselves actually had. It was part of
Speaker 3: their culture to not call themselves the Aztec. The word
Speaker 3: Aztec means somebody from Atslan. Atslan is what they called
Speaker 3: their northern Mexico homeland. Okay, so they were the people
Speaker 3: from Utslan. The Spaniards were like, oh, we'll just call
Speaker 3: you Aztec, but they called themselves that the Meshica. And
Speaker 3: that's me e Xica, which is where we get the
Speaker 3: word Mexico or Mexico from. So it all comes from
Speaker 3: comes from that.
Speaker 1: So folks in these regions for years and years and
Speaker 1: years have been amazing hunters. And why a tool called
Speaker 1: an at lattle at a lattle, so.
Speaker 3: The in the original Nawak pronunciation at lattle would probably
Speaker 3: sound something like a A. That DL is called a
Speaker 3: voiceless lateral fricative in linguistics, which means that the sound
Speaker 3: is not made from your vocal cords. So if you
Speaker 3: made the TL sound, your vocal cords wouldn't vibrate. You
Speaker 3: can put your finger to your vocal cord and you
Speaker 3: kind of see what sounds make a vibration or what
Speaker 3: sounds don't. So a sound like a T or like
Speaker 3: an S doesn't vibrate your your vocal cords, but something
Speaker 3: like an M definitely does vibrate your vocal cords. So
Speaker 3: that's the difference between voiceless and not voiceless. Lateral means
Speaker 3: that the air causing the sound is moving sideways around
Speaker 3: your tongue instead of coming straight out, it's coming out
Speaker 3: sideways in the back of your tongue, kind of around
Speaker 3: your tongue. And then fricative means that the air is
Speaker 3: kind of turbulating inside your mouth to make the noise.
Speaker 3: So it's this very strange sound. I don't know how
Speaker 3: well it's coming up on the mic, but okay. So
Speaker 3: the TL it's the hallmark of the Nahwaq language. You
Speaker 3: can see TL in all sorts of Nawak's words, like
Speaker 3: that salamander, the the axe, lottel ps.
Speaker 1: Personal side note, Once I got called out of second
Speaker 1: grade class by this nice lady who asked me to
Speaker 1: answer a few really stupid questions like what goes on
Speaker 1: a pizza? Duh cheese? Okay, what travels down the railroad? Huh?
Speaker 1: You see a cutue train? Then for several months I
Speaker 1: had to report to a trailer near the playground to
Speaker 1: relearn these frictive lateral lisps. And yes, I know that
Speaker 1: we need a speech pathology episode asap. I know I'm
Speaker 1: on it. Anyway, I feel better about my phs now
Speaker 1: that I know that they're kind of like a sexy
Speaker 1: flourish in other languages. Also, buckle the frick up for
Speaker 1: a tale that is like drunk history, only minus the
Speaker 1: hot tubs and barfing. Who damn, this is a journey.
Speaker 1: I love it. Boy howdy.
Speaker 3: I want to give credit to one of my idols
Speaker 3: in the archaeology world, Zelia Natal. She is one of
Speaker 3: the most badass archaeologist of all time. Uh. I think
Speaker 3: she's amazing. She was an Mexican Irish American born in
Speaker 3: San Francisco to a Mexican American mom and an Irish dad.
Speaker 3: She went to school in Europe met an anthropology student.
Speaker 3: I think he was like a Dutch. I think he
Speaker 3: was Dutch. A Dutch anthropology student. She would read his
Speaker 3: textbooks at night, taught herself anthropology. As a family trip
Speaker 3: they went to Mexico. She was so knowledgeable, especially about
Speaker 3: Mexican archaeology, because of her mom, who taught her some Nahwach.
Speaker 3: She was able to do some of these early translations
Speaker 3: and have a better understanding of the linguistic history of
Speaker 3: the Meshicu people in Mexico. She became one of the first,
Speaker 3: if not the first, honorary professor at the National Museum
Speaker 3: of Anthropology in Mexico City, and that was in like
Speaker 3: eighteen eighty four, so like way before any college was
Speaker 3: admitting women. She was the pioneer. She did so well
Speaker 3: with her post at the National Museum of Anthropology that
Speaker 3: in eighteen eighty six she got hired by the Harvard
Speaker 3: University Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology as a contributor
Speaker 3: for meso American archaeology. And while she was working with them,
Speaker 3: she moved to Europe again, where she spent like ten
Speaker 3: years in archives in libraries and she found previously lost
Speaker 3: Aztec and Zeppotech codeses or manuscripts or books that were
Speaker 3: shipped by the Spaniards back to Europe, thrown into a
Speaker 3: crate in the bottom of the library and forgotten about
Speaker 3: for five hundred years.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, and she found two of them.
Speaker 3: H There are only like a handful of these at
Speaker 3: all for any of the mental American cultures, and like
Speaker 3: a large proportion of them were found by her alone.
Speaker 3: So while she was studying all of these manuscripts in Europe,
Speaker 3: the godfather of cultural anthropology, Edward Burnett Tyler, he wrote
Speaker 3: this book Primitive Culture. It established cultural anthropology. Now, it
Speaker 3: definitely was not great because it assumed that Western culture
Speaker 3: was the pinnacle of human society and everyone else was
Speaker 3: behind to some degree, which obviously is something that modern
Speaker 3: anthropologists archaologist completely reject as a model for human civilization.
Speaker 3: But he has this quote, the Aztec civilization is the
Speaker 3: highest known to have used the spear thrower, in reality
Speaker 3: a weapon of savagery. And we do not hear of
Speaker 3: the at lattle being in practical use at the conquest,
Speaker 3: when it had apparently fallen out of disuse end quote.
Speaker 1: Spear throwers, remember, are at lattles. So what this crusty
Speaker 1: old man was doing was shittuking at littles and the
Speaker 1: people who use them, like, how dare now? Zelia and
Speaker 1: Tall was like, excuse me.
Speaker 3: So she read that quote and he's basically saying because
Speaker 3: the Aztecs used the at laddle, they were like stupid
Speaker 3: savages because the rest of the world moved on to
Speaker 3: the bone arrow and they're the only ones left in
Speaker 3: the world that little which isn't true, but you know,
Speaker 3: at the time, that's what he thought. So she said,
Speaker 3: you know what, I'm going to write the first book
Speaker 3: all about at lattles, and I went to prove him wrong.
Speaker 3: So in the opening paragraph she calls him out directly
Speaker 3: and says, like this will be a response to anybody
Speaker 3: who thinks that the Mexican people are stupid because we
Speaker 3: use a lattles. I'm going to show you how awesome
Speaker 3: they are. She wrote this crazy, amazing book in eighteen
Speaker 3: ninety one and it's basically the first ever academic study
Speaker 3: on the at lattles. And she looks at it not
Speaker 3: from like an experimental archaeology perspective, so she didn't make
Speaker 3: it a little She's never thrown in that lattle, but
Speaker 3: she looked at artistic depictions in those books that she
Speaker 3: found in other books that were published, literary descriptions and
Speaker 3: archaeological examples that were found, and she realized that at
Speaker 3: laddles were actually really well adapted for aquatic hunting, and
Speaker 3: she connected the word at laddle to fishermen. Fishermen is atlakatl,
Speaker 3: which literally means watermen and tlaca means to aim or throw,
Speaker 3: So if you put those together, it's ak which is
Speaker 3: literally water thrower. So that was her theory for where
Speaker 3: the word autlatto comes from. It's because it was used
Speaker 3: as a fishing weapon. It has this name associated with
Speaker 3: with water. And she also found descriptions of now Wa
Speaker 3: people and people in the Aztec religion explained that in
Speaker 3: their tradition there was a demigod named Oputli who invented
Speaker 3: the atlattle for fishing and taught it to the Meshica people.
Speaker 1: So Angelo says that according to indigenous culture, this weapon
Speaker 1: was considered to be handed down directly by the Meshika's
Speaker 1: god of war for some deity approved ass kicking, and
Speaker 1: that no other weapon in the Aztec armory is described
Speaker 1: with as much reverence as the atlattle. It's thought that
Speaker 1: only the upper tier of the military and noblemen and
Speaker 1: generals and the elite essentially royalty were even allowed to
Speaker 1: use at Laddles, and they let the commoners use the
Speaker 1: peasant weapon, which was the bow and arrow. Oh it's
Speaker 1: petty and I love it. Also history, y'all, it's just
Speaker 1: gossip that matters, and all it takes is someone who
Speaker 1: is willing to dish. Now, specifically about Zeli Anatol.
Speaker 3: The story gets crazier. I think somebody should make a
Speaker 3: movie about her, and they should consult me. Hint, hint,
Speaker 3: win quink. But so I just wanted to throw this
Speaker 3: out because I think it's important to highlight especially like
Speaker 3: women of color in archaeology, especially this long ago, and
Speaker 3: so few people know about her, even archaeology students, that
Speaker 3: I just can't pass an opportunity to tell her full story.
Speaker 3: After she wrote this thing about that at Laddle, which
Speaker 3: became very popular because it made so much sense, and
Speaker 3: she published a lot of pictures about it, she moved
Speaker 3: back to Mexico and she ran an excavation at the
Speaker 3: Isla Desacrafios or the Island of Sacrifices. L colleague tried
Speaker 3: to steal credit from her for the excavation, of course,
Speaker 3: so she quit her post with the National Museum of Anthropology,
Speaker 3: published all of her notes and findings in an academic journal,
Speaker 3: which were so detailed it was so painfully obvious that
Speaker 3: she was the actual person who had figured out the
Speaker 3: site and excavated it that the other guy was fired
Speaker 3: in disgrace. No, she was like, oh, you're not going
Speaker 3: to respect me, and I'm going to I'm just going
Speaker 3: to quit and then disgrace you in an academic journal
Speaker 3: and show that you are a hack. And she did it.
Speaker 3: So then she got the attention of Phoebe Hurst, who
Speaker 3: was the mother of William Randolph Hurst, who runs the
Speaker 3: newspaper in New York, you know, one of the richest
Speaker 3: richest people in that time period. She becomes zealand Natal's patron,
Speaker 3: buying a house for her in Mexico City and funding
Speaker 3: all of her studies and excavations, with the agreement that
Speaker 3: some of the material that Zelean and Taal would excavate
Speaker 3: would go back to the newly formed Phoebe Hurst Museum
Speaker 3: of Anthropology and Archaeology, UC Berkeley. So it all comes
Speaker 3: like full circle back to San Francisco, whereas le natal
Speaker 3: was born. She ends up advocating for indigenous rights in
Speaker 3: Mexico until she dies, and she convinces Mexico City to
Speaker 3: recognize March twelfth as as Tech New Year, Indigenous New Year,
Speaker 3: where it is still celebrated to this day by the
Speaker 3: Nahua people who still live in central and northern Mexico
Speaker 3: to this day. I think there's like one point two
Speaker 3: million now Off speakers still in Mexico. And she got
Speaker 3: it formally recognized by the government and it was celebrated
Speaker 3: in Mexico City the former site of North Street Line
Speaker 3: on March twelfth, nineteen twenty eight, for the first time
Speaker 3: since fifteen twenty when the conquest happened. I'm going it's
Speaker 3: going to crazy. And to this day, Mexico is known,
Speaker 3: out of all the meso American countries as a country
Speaker 3: that protects from a government perspective, they're archaeological sites. Really strictly,
Speaker 3: they're really good about protecting the sites and doing good
Speaker 3: research and having tourism. But a lot of people credit
Speaker 3: her specifically for that because at the time, in the
Speaker 3: nineteen twenties in Mexico, there was a big push to
Speaker 3: ignore indigenous rights, but specifically ignore indigenous history of Mexico
Speaker 3: in favor of the Spanish history. So a lot of
Speaker 3: people were rejecting that they were, you know, had any
Speaker 3: roots to indigenous Mexico at this time because a lot
Speaker 3: of people in Mexico thought that the key to their
Speaker 3: acceptance on the global stage, as Mexico kind of has independence,
Speaker 3: is becoming you know, a country in a globalized world
Speaker 3: in the nineteen twenties, that they felt that they would
Speaker 3: get further with Western countries if they rejected the indigenous
Speaker 3: background and just were like, yeah, we're Spandard European like
Speaker 3: you guys, where we can play in the global stage,
Speaker 3: because I mean, who do they have to look examples
Speaker 3: to the United States, which also ignored indigenous rights and
Speaker 3: culture and other places you know, around the world that
Speaker 3: have done terrible things to indigenous people. So they were
Speaker 3: just following the lead of the world superpowers at the time.
Speaker 3: And she said, no, we should embrace our indigenous heritage.
Speaker 3: We should cut indigenous voices. We should know, let indigenous
Speaker 3: people celebrate the holidays and recognize those holidays because that's
Speaker 3: what makes us unique. And if anyone tells you that
Speaker 3: a laddles are what make indigenous Mexicans stupid. Just refer
Speaker 3: them to me because I want to set them straight. Yeah,
Speaker 3: she's my hero as I'm Mexican American, as a Mexican
Speaker 3: American archaeology student, she is like just such an idol
Speaker 3: to me. Plus she's the first person to study at Lattle's.
Speaker 3: She's like, she's my hero.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm gonna cry. Are you gonna cry? Because I'm
Speaker 1: gonna cry. Also, by the way, if anyone needs to
Speaker 1: honor a badass with the great name for say their daughter,
Speaker 1: may I suggest Celia? I mean, come on. Also, let's
Speaker 1: finally talk to details about this tool or is it
Speaker 1: a weapon? Okay, I look this up. All weapons are tools,
Speaker 1: but not all tools are weapons. So in this case
Speaker 1: and at Lattle is a tool of attack or defense,
Speaker 1: i e. It's weapon. Also, now that we have the
Speaker 1: rich be backstory, what is this thing in.
Speaker 3: Terms of what is in that laddle? Okay? And that
Speaker 3: laddle is actually a Okay, it is a stick with
Speaker 3: a handle on one end and a hook on the
Speaker 3: other end that engages with the rear end of a dart,
Speaker 3: which is a long, thin, flexible wooden spear type thing
Speaker 3: that has a little dimple at the end behind the feathers.
Speaker 3: The spur of the at laddle or the hook engages
Speaker 3: with that knock and it propels the dart further and
Speaker 3: harder than you could throwing it by hand. So the
Speaker 3: out ladder refers to just the throwing stick part itself. Oh,
Speaker 3: dart is the separate implement, So it's the atladdle in dart.
Speaker 3: Colloquially we just call the entire system in at laddle. Okay.
Speaker 3: The cool thing about at laddles is that they were
Speaker 3: used all over the world. And if we kind of
Speaker 3: go back to the earlier question of like the progression
Speaker 3: of human technology, the earliest at laddle's we have date
Speaker 3: to about twenty thousand years ago. In fact, it's seventeen thousand,
Speaker 3: five hundred years is like the radiocarbon date that was
Speaker 3: found in France. It was a lattle made out of antler,
Speaker 3: and that's kind of after Neanderthals, that was all Homo sapiens. Now,
Speaker 3: the thing is that at lattle use is theorized to
Speaker 3: go back as far as forty five thousand BCE, so
Speaker 3: quite a long time before that. And the way we
Speaker 3: know this is because when you throw at laddle's. It
Speaker 3: puts a lot of strain on your elbow and you
Speaker 3: develop in our threatus condition that bio archaeologists call at
Speaker 3: lattle elbow.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: So there is actually a skeleton from Australia that dates
Speaker 3: to forty two thousand years ago called the Mungo Man.
Speaker 1: Mungo Man side note is also referred to as LM
Speaker 1: three and was found laid out in a somewhat extravagant
Speaker 1: ceremonial burial. And he was thought to have been about
Speaker 1: fifty years old, which is like middle aged for us now,
Speaker 1: but heca old for back then and he stood around
Speaker 1: six foot five, which is unusually tall. So what else
Speaker 1: is interesting about this amazing man's remains?
Speaker 3: And he has extreme at lattle elbow in his right elbow,
Speaker 3: and it's theorized that that's because he was throwing an
Speaker 3: out laddle and that puts the at laddle to be
Speaker 3: about forty five thousand BCE.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: They at laddle is the first two part weapon system
Speaker 3: potentially two part tool system as well. Got a complex
Speaker 3: tool system ever invented by comminides So and to break
Speaker 3: that down, a compound tool is something that has two
Speaker 3: or more materials. So remember when I talked earlier about
Speaker 3: the hafting where you take the stone and you blew
Speaker 3: it onto the stick. So that's a compound tool. But
Speaker 3: then a complex tool is a tool that uses two
Speaker 3: separate implements that are not like permanently attacked. So a
Speaker 3: bow and arrow or an at laddle in dart, those
Speaker 3: are complex tools. Okay, So the at laddle is or
Speaker 3: you know, the spear thrower of the at laddle is
Speaker 3: the oldest, potentially the oldest complex two part weaponar tool
Speaker 3: system ever invented. It's also the potentially the first weaponar
Speaker 3: tool system that was unique to the Homo sapien species
Speaker 3: because Neanderthals were using thrusting spears and potentially throwing spears,
Speaker 3: and the bow and arrow wouldn't be really invented for
Speaker 3: like another twenty thousand, thirty thousand years. So this was
Speaker 3: what kind of Homo sapien the human species brought to
Speaker 3: the stage.
Speaker 1: Angelou said also that using tools allowed us to access
Speaker 1: more nutrition while expending fewer calories, and hunting with an
Speaker 1: at lattel uses way fewer calories than like chasing a
Speaker 1: deer for ten miles until it's just like fine. Now,
Speaker 1: those extra calories and possibly the fatty stuff from brains
Speaker 1: and bone marrow have enabled our ancestors to grow bigger brains,
Speaker 1: which allowed us to invent weapons and reality TV and
Speaker 1: finally global warming and nuclear existential risk, but also puppy
Speaker 1: calendars and coffee creamer, which is good.
Speaker 3: Potentially, it's the Homo sapiens ability to develop these complex
Speaker 3: tools that allowed them to kind of outlast and survive,
Speaker 3: and the Lattle is the first indication of this. So
Speaker 3: it is this really old universal weapon. Everybody in humanity
Speaker 3: is connected by their use of a outlattles because it
Speaker 3: was used by everybody. And we have found at lattle
Speaker 3: remains or at little evidence on every continant except for
Speaker 3: Africa and Antarctica. Now again that doesn't mean that they
Speaker 3: weren't used in Africa. It just means we haven't found
Speaker 3: evidence of their use in Africa, but we have lots
Speaker 3: of evidence of the use, you know, in Asia and
Speaker 3: Europe and Australia and North America and South America.
Speaker 1: And do you think that they developed all from the
Speaker 1: kind of same source or do you think a lot
Speaker 1: of people on different continents thought, hey, what if I
Speaker 1: put a do hookie on the end of the sticky stick,
Speaker 1: and then I'm able to kill more stuff more efficiently
Speaker 1: from farther away.
Speaker 3: That's the big question that's really hard to tell. I'm
Speaker 3: not sure. There's no clear answer. It does seem like
Speaker 3: the use in North and South America is associated with
Speaker 3: a human migration across the Bearing Land Bridge around fifteen
Speaker 3: thousand BCE, So it seems like at lattle use wasn't
Speaker 3: developed independently in North and South America, but it was
Speaker 3: brought by the people who migrated over the Bearing Land Bridge.
Speaker 3: In terms of the rest of Europe and Asia, I
Speaker 3: am and Australia, I am not sure, and I don't
Speaker 3: think that's really been answered. Is how it spread. And
Speaker 3: let's say it was started in one area and then
Speaker 3: spread to other areas. There's two ways that could have happened.
Speaker 3: Either the people who developed it taught it to other people,
Speaker 3: and then those people took it to their areas and
Speaker 3: taught it to other people. Or the original group who
Speaker 3: developed the at laddle broke off and they migrated to
Speaker 3: other areas, bringing out little use with them. So it's
Speaker 3: the difference between teaching and migrating. We're not entirely sure
Speaker 3: how it's spread. And that kind of goes for the
Speaker 3: bone arrow as well, which most estimates put the bone
Speaker 3: arrow as being invented around fifteen thousand BCE, so that's
Speaker 3: a full twenty thousand years after the at laddle was invented.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's surprising to me that there's such a gap,
Speaker 1: such a huge gap.
Speaker 3: Now there is there is conflicting evidence that bows and
Speaker 3: arrows go back to forty thousand BCE as well, but
Speaker 3: that's fairly inconclusive evidence, so that's kind of a little
Speaker 3: bit questionable as well. We're not entirely sure, but it
Speaker 3: seems like bows came significantly after at laddles. Now, the
Speaker 3: thing about at laddles is that they are it's not
Speaker 3: just a stick that throws another stick. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of engineering that goes into it. So because you're extending
Speaker 3: your arm by having this handle, you're increasing your leverage
Speaker 3: and you're also increasing your angular momentum at the tip
Speaker 3: of the tool.
Speaker 1: Y'all have been asking me for a physics episode, So
Speaker 1: here you go.
Speaker 3: And that transfers a lot more energy into the dart.
Speaker 3: The other thing is that you're propelling the dart from
Speaker 3: behind the center of gravity as opposed to throwing a javelin,
Speaker 3: where you're holding the javelin at the center of gravity.
Speaker 3: That means that you're able to with that laddle, you're
Speaker 3: able to put more energy into the entire dart system,
Speaker 3: which propels it further. So there's something about propelling something
Speaker 3: from behind a certain of gravity that works a lot better.
Speaker 3: If you think about a bone arrow, the bow string
Speaker 3: engages the rear of the arrow, propelling it from behind,
Speaker 3: just like in that laddle. Also, the most this is
Speaker 3: the number one thing that people get wrong when they
Speaker 3: try to make that laddle or they try to understand
Speaker 3: that the laddels.
Speaker 1: This is the flint plan.
Speaker 3: The most kind of flim flam. Yeah, the most important
Speaker 3: part of the at lattle and dart system is the
Speaker 3: flexibility of the dart.
Speaker 1: Really, so it's got.
Speaker 3: It's gotta go boil you annoying. And if you look
Speaker 3: at slow motion video, not even slow motion you just
Speaker 3: look at in person, you know, real speed video. Because
Speaker 3: the darts are so long, you can see the flex
Speaker 3: happen in real time. We're talking six to eight inches
Speaker 3: of flex while it's flying, which is a lot.
Speaker 1: I've seen footage and it really wobbles, and you're like, shit,
Speaker 1: is that okay? And it is by design.
Speaker 3: And without the flex. If you try to throw up
Speaker 3: a stiff spear with an at laddle, the spear would
Speaker 3: fishtail in the air because all the energy going into
Speaker 3: the rear of the dart needs to go somewhere, and
Speaker 3: the tip of the dart kind of resists motion because
Speaker 3: of Newton's laws, So all that energy used to go somewhere,
Speaker 3: and eventually the tip starts raising. And what happens is
Speaker 3: you flick the rear of the dart underneath the spear,
Speaker 3: which causes it to fish tail in the air. And
Speaker 3: that laddle dart, on the other hand, flexes while you're throwing,
Speaker 3: so right as you're about to throw, the dart flexes,
Speaker 3: storing the energy, keeping the point straight on target. And
Speaker 3: then that flex releases as you finish flicking the laddle,
Speaker 3: which causes it to flex in the air but stay
Speaker 3: on target the whole way. At laddle darts are thicker
Speaker 3: in the front than they are in the rear, which
Speaker 3: means there's a taper, a very smooth taper, usually from
Speaker 3: about half inch at the tip half inch in diameter
Speaker 3: to the tip to three eighths inch diameter at the feathers,
Speaker 3: at the fletchings, there's more flex happening on the feather
Speaker 3: end than there is at the tip end, which means
Speaker 3: the tip stays on target and the rest of the
Speaker 3: dart flexes around the tip.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, that is you can imagine physics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sold physics. And you can imagine if the
Speaker 3: dart is an even diameter across the whole thing, as
Speaker 3: you know, if there's not a taper, that means that
Speaker 3: the majority of the flex is going to be at
Speaker 3: the middle of the dart. It's going to flex up
Speaker 3: and down. But that means that both the tip and
Speaker 3: the feathers are going to flex six to eight inches
Speaker 3: around the target, which that could be the difference between
Speaker 3: it a hit and a miss if you're trying to hunt.
Speaker 1: And then what is the arrow point? What like, what
Speaker 1: are what types of materials or the tip?
Speaker 3: So definitely to get to this specialized you need to
Speaker 3: use one of those good stones that I talked about earlier,
Speaker 3: so flint hirt or obsidian. That's basically it.
Speaker 1: Obsidian he told me cand get sharp. But how thin
Speaker 1: is this razor's edge.
Speaker 3: Obsidian does get to a sharpness level on a molecular
Speaker 3: level that's unknown to any other technology that humans have created.
Speaker 3: It's it's like ten times sharper than surgical steel, which
Speaker 3: is crazy to even think about. Yeah, the problem is
Speaker 3: obsidian is very brittle, so it's good for it's very sharp,
Speaker 3: but it breaks very quickly. Flint and chirt are not
Speaker 3: as sharp, but that are much more durable, So there's
Speaker 3: a trade off between the two. And when you're using
Speaker 3: an obsidian point on a tool like an arrow or
Speaker 3: a spearhead or that Lottle point, that tool isn't necessarily
Speaker 3: that molecular sharp because you would purposely effectively dull the
Speaker 3: edge to make it more durable. It's still very sharp,
Speaker 3: but it's not that like molecular level sharp. They would
Speaker 3: use molecular level sharpness obsidian tools for other purposes, but
Speaker 3: not necessarily for projectile points because they're too weak those tools.
Speaker 3: It's a process called flint napping, and it's the process
Speaker 3: of making small chips or flakes out of a crystalline
Speaker 3: silica rock like flint, chirt, or obsidian, in order to
Speaker 3: make tools in a specific shape or pattern. Personally with
Speaker 3: flint napping, I always have issue. I can either get
Speaker 3: the tool really sharp or I can get the tool
Speaker 3: in the right shape, but it's really hard to get
Speaker 3: both sharp and in the right shape. So that's kind
Speaker 3: of what I'm working on right now. I practice fortnapping
Speaker 3: a lot, but that's generally what the tips would be
Speaker 3: made out of. Out of those three materials, and even
Speaker 3: sometimes like one group would use you know, two or
Speaker 3: three different types of materials to make their points, depending
Speaker 3: on what they had access to. Oh, I think it's
Speaker 3: important to note that, you know, at lattels were called
Speaker 3: different things with different people, So specifically in Australia they
Speaker 3: call them wamras. Instead of being like a six five
Speaker 3: or six foot at lattle dark, they would use seven
Speaker 3: or nine foot at little darts. They're really really long
Speaker 3: and heavy, and they would use really long womras, which
Speaker 3: is what they called their at laddles. And the cool
Speaker 3: thing about Australian wumras is that they're like a Swiss
Speaker 3: army knife. They would actually attached with glue a knife
Speaker 3: like an obsidian or a flint knife into the handle
Speaker 3: to use like as a knife. The at lattel itself
Speaker 3: is very differently shaped. Instead of being a stick, it's
Speaker 3: more of like this cup or bowl shape that's really
Speaker 3: really big and rounded. They could use that to collect berries.
Speaker 3: They would paint maps on the inside of their of
Speaker 3: their womeras, and they would even put notches in the
Speaker 3: womeras to make friction fires. So with one womera and
Speaker 3: one at little or one dart, you're basically set to
Speaker 3: go to survive the Australian out back. It had everything
Speaker 3: you needed.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, that is so genius. Ten out of
Speaker 1: ten would buy on impulse at Arii.
Speaker 3: So genius at lattos are are pretty terrifying. They because
Speaker 3: you're thinking, like, okay, well handthlon sphere compared to a
Speaker 3: bone arrow, what's the damage difference here? Well, a bone
Speaker 3: arrow an arrow is lighter and it travels faster, and
Speaker 3: a little dart is heavier, still travels fast, but doesn't
Speaker 3: travel as fast, so there's a trade off. But the
Speaker 3: impact force of an outlattle dart is big enough to
Speaker 3: take down a wooly mammoth because that's what they were
Speaker 3: used for North America, specifically the Clovis people, where that
Speaker 3: kind of Clovis culture was in Canada and in northeastern
Speaker 3: the United States about thirteen thousand years ago, and they
Speaker 3: used at lottles to hunt mammoth. Modern tests with at
Speaker 3: laddles have found that they can reach speeds at little
Speaker 3: darts can reach speeds around eighty miles per hour and
Speaker 3: the world record, yeah, crazy fast. The world record for
Speaker 3: not lattle throw in terms of distance is two hundred
Speaker 3: and I think it's two hundred and sixty meters, which
Speaker 3: is eight hundred and fifty feet, So you're talking almost
Speaker 3: three full football fields.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3: But modern at lattle users part of the world at
Speaker 3: Little Association, which I'm on the board of directors of,
Speaker 3: we host competitions and there are people who can nail
Speaker 3: a six inch a six to eight inch target at
Speaker 3: twenty meters, which is you know, it's almost almost seventy feet. Yeah,
Speaker 3: with like ninety five percent accuracy.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable. How much practice does that take, as someone who
Speaker 1: throws at ales at lottles, pardon how much practice does
Speaker 1: that take to get that kind of precision.
Speaker 3: I've been throwing at laddles for almost I'm trying to
Speaker 3: think I've been throwing at lottles for like seven or
Speaker 3: eight years. But I've been studying at Lattles for ten
Speaker 3: or eleven years, and I'm still not at that accuracy level.
Speaker 3: I'm decent. When I've competed in the youth division, I
Speaker 3: did pretty well, but now that I'm in the adult division,
Speaker 3: I do pretty terribly. But some of these guys have
Speaker 3: been throwing for twenty thirty forty years and they are
Speaker 3: they're like they're like ancient sniper's. It's pretty incredible. They
Speaker 3: will literally nail the smallest of targets from impossible distances.
Speaker 3: Most people with a bone arrow aren't able to have
Speaker 3: that level of accuracy. Spaniards wrote that at Lattle darts
Speaker 3: could go through chain mail, and modern tests have proven
Speaker 3: that at Lattle darts will go through chain mail. Even
Speaker 3: even these European conquisisors who had never seen that laddle
Speaker 3: before because Europe stopped using that laddle like fifteen thousand
Speaker 3: years prior. They're seeing tens of thousands of Mexican and
Speaker 3: Aztec soldiers throwing a rain cloud of darts that are
Speaker 3: flying at eighty miles an hour with giant obsidian razor
Speaker 3: sharp broadheads on them, coming from one hundred to two
Speaker 3: hundred feet away. It's terrifying. They were terrified of the
Speaker 3: laddle more than almost any other weapon because they had
Speaker 3: I mean, even their archers weren't that powerful. So that
Speaker 3: I think that's really interesting that they just wrote about
Speaker 3: how terrified they were of about Lotte's and I would
Speaker 3: be terrified as well if I was on a receiving
Speaker 3: end one of these things.
Speaker 1: Why do you think any type of culture stopped using them?
Speaker 3: Okay, great question. I totally forgot to bring that out,
Speaker 3: But yeah, a couple things. So, laddles were developed during
Speaker 3: the Pleistocene, which is the Ice Age, and they, like
Speaker 3: I mentioned, they were really used to hunt big Ice
Speaker 3: Age megafauna, so like giant ground sloths, wooly mammoth, stuff
Speaker 3: like that. Also, during the plisis scene, because it was
Speaker 3: so cold, a lot of the world, especially in a
Speaker 3: lot of the Northern Hemisphere, was like more of a
Speaker 3: tundra than it was a forest. So the aladdo kind
Speaker 3: of works well in this open environment because the throwing
Speaker 3: motion is what I like to call visually loud. It's
Speaker 3: not you know, it doesn't make a noise, but it's
Speaker 3: a big motion, whereas with a bone arrow you can
Speaker 3: the motion to release an arrow is just releasing your
Speaker 3: fingers and it makes almost no movement at all. So
Speaker 3: as the Ice age ended, animals got smaller and more
Speaker 3: skittish like deer, and humans were hunting in more densely
Speaker 3: wooded areas, which makes swinging a big atladdle really difficult.
Speaker 3: And also the throwing, the swinging motion of the at
Speaker 3: lattle potentially could scare the deer before the atlatto could
Speaker 3: reach it.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: That kind of begs the question, Okay, well, then why
Speaker 3: did at lattle use stay in North and South America
Speaker 3: as long as it did. For the Aztecs. It might
Speaker 3: be because of that religious reason. They just they stuck
Speaker 3: with it because they felt that a strong religious connection
Speaker 3: to it. But other areas, you know, didn't really develop
Speaker 3: the boat arrow until a lot later, and they were
Speaker 3: still using specifically in the American Southwest, which is where
Speaker 3: I am. We're using at Laddle's you know, up until
Speaker 3: well up until about like fifty BCE because kind of
Speaker 3: when the boat starts being developed maybe a little bit
Speaker 3: earlier than that, but at Lattle's dominated in these desert
Speaker 3: environments because they were a little bit more open kind
Speaker 3: of like how the tundra was open, and they would
Speaker 3: use them to hunt bighorn sheep. Right where I near
Speaker 3: where I lived in Las Vegas is a place called
Speaker 3: Valley of Fire State Park. And there's a place called
Speaker 3: at Lattle Rock. And it's called at Laddle Rock because
Speaker 3: at the top of the cliff there are pictographs and
Speaker 3: Petrick I'm sorry, Petrick cliffs of at Laddles that are
Speaker 3: about like two thousand year old Petrick Cliffs now. And
Speaker 3: the colding is that the at Laddles are so perfect.
Speaker 3: It's almost like they held up in that lattle and
Speaker 3: traced it into the rock. Like they even show the
Speaker 3: darts with the feathers and everything.
Speaker 1: So this might even be up to four thousand years old.
Speaker 1: And I looked up photos and in this red rocked
Speaker 1: Southern Nevada landscape, up a steep, winding steel staircase to
Speaker 1: the top of a deep ochre desert boulder formation is
Speaker 1: what looks to be graffiti etched in rock. But it's
Speaker 1: this beautiful line art of antelopes and targets and a
Speaker 1: long dart and boom and at Laddle with two little
Speaker 1: finger holes. More on that in a minute. Also, some
Speaker 1: absolute dick hole with the initials BBC added to this art,
Speaker 1: and I hope they burn their tongue on hot soup.
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm sorry. I'm really mad. Also, at this
Speaker 1: point in making the episode, I wanted to just bail
Speaker 1: and last Bonjobi through the warm August air until I
Speaker 1: arrived in this desert in the valley of Nevada fire
Speaker 1: to stare at this rock, which is just proof positive
Speaker 1: that an ologist can make you fall in love with
Speaker 1: an obscure tool that you just never knew existed. Now
Speaker 1: in the Southwest and into Mexico, at lettles had some
Speaker 1: special features.
Speaker 3: They actually switched up the grip. Instead of holding that
Speaker 3: a laddle like a hammer, they would create these fingerholes
Speaker 3: to put their fingers through and kind of hold it
Speaker 3: with this upturned hand. Turns out that reduces the elbow
Speaker 3: strain that causes because you can imagine if you got
Speaker 3: if you got atlattle elbow and you can't hunt anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's it. That's game over. Yeah, So they developed different
Speaker 3: throwing style in order to prevent that at Lattle elbow.
Speaker 3: They also developed compound darts that had detachable foreshafts. So
Speaker 3: the idea behind these were you have like a five
Speaker 3: foot main shaft with the feathers, and then you have
Speaker 3: like a one foot fore shaft at actually has the
Speaker 3: obsidian point in it. The fore shaft goes into the
Speaker 3: main shaft. You throw that at a bighorn sheep. When
Speaker 3: it hits the bighorn sheep, the hope is that the
Speaker 3: main shaft pops out, leaving the fore shaft in, because
Speaker 3: if the bighorn sheep ran with that big six or
Speaker 3: long shaft still attached, it would hit a tree and
Speaker 3: break and then there goes all your hard work.
Speaker 4: Oh man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that allowed humans to go collect the main shaft,
Speaker 3: put on a new point, and throw it again. So
Speaker 3: hunters only needed to carry one or two main shafts
Speaker 3: and then carry a small pouch of like five or
Speaker 3: six foreshafts.
Speaker 1: Genius. That is genius. So think of a fancy quill
Speaker 1: pen with a bunch of different nibs. Also, some anthropologists
Speaker 1: postulate that this was the first ever complex use of
Speaker 1: the phrase just the tip. That's not true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And we call that a basket maker style. At Lattle.
Speaker 3: It was very very common about fifteen hundred BCE in
Speaker 3: central and southern Nevada, northern Arizona, southern Colorado and kind
Speaker 3: of that Four Corners area. The basketmaker people would eventually
Speaker 3: become the ancestral Pabloan people who eventually became what we
Speaker 3: now know is like the Hopie and the Zuni Publo
Speaker 3: Publo indigenous people of the Four Corners area. So it
Speaker 3: has this rich, long history in this area, and this
Speaker 3: basket maker style actually shows up all over the Southwest,
Speaker 3: and because of the aridity of the desert here, we
Speaker 3: find more intact at lattles in the American Southwest than
Speaker 3: we do anywhere else in the world. In fact, the
Speaker 3: most intact at lattle ever found is the broken Roof
Speaker 3: Cave at Laddle, who's found in the nineteen twenties or
Speaker 3: thirties in Arizona.
Speaker 1: Ps I look this up and it's right near the
Speaker 1: Utah border, and it's got this kicky name because rocks
Speaker 1: just literally would rain down on researchers as they excavated
Speaker 1: things like burial sites and human remains. But also in
Speaker 1: at Laddle with some darts, and despite being thousands of
Speaker 1: years old, it's beautifully preserved. It's made out of oak
Speaker 1: with hide finger loops and a nice dainty little curve
Speaker 1: to it.
Speaker 3: And you can find pictures of it online. Broken roof
Speaker 3: Cave at Laddle. It is absolutely gorgeous. It still has
Speaker 3: the leather finger loops intact, it has all the weights intact,
Speaker 3: the spurns carved beautifully. It's incredible. And we just find
Speaker 3: artifacts like that in the Southwest because it's so dry,
Speaker 3: things preserve a lot longer. And the cool thing is
Speaker 3: that that throwing style with the finger loops and stuff
Speaker 3: we find as far south as the Yuka Ten Peninsula
Speaker 3: in Mexico. Whether it was spread by people or whether
Speaker 3: it was developed independently. Either way, the longest users of
Speaker 3: at Laddle's developed this throwing style that prevented that at
Speaker 3: Little Elbow. And the last thing I want to mention
Speaker 3: before you too Patreon questions. I know, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: Obsession is contagious, so lay it on me. I'm ready.
Speaker 3: This is a crazy thing. It was an experiment archaeology
Speaker 3: project that I got to be a part of involving
Speaker 3: at Lattles and it involves the multi civilization of Peru.
Speaker 3: So the multi civilization were around between like one hundred
Speaker 3: and seven hundred CE before the Incan Empire, like well
Speaker 3: before the Incan Empire and they used at lattels a lot.
Speaker 3: And there's this guy, Christopher Donnan. He's an archaeology professor
Speaker 3: at UCLA and he has been the expert on the
Speaker 3: Multra civilization for like thirty years, like he studied it
Speaker 3: more than anyone else. And he found a bunch of
Speaker 3: these pots that have paintings on the pot of people
Speaker 3: throwing at laddles at some aerial target. And he didn't
Speaker 3: really understand what it was. And the atlattles look weird.
Speaker 3: They have these weird wooden cross pegs. Didn't understand it.
Speaker 3: So he took it to the world at lott of
Speaker 3: Association and he said, hey, what do you guys think
Speaker 3: this is? And we spent the next year redeveloping the
Speaker 3: Mulchitas game. And basically what it is is there's a
Speaker 3: giant turkey feather shuttleclock that's attached for lattle dart. Throw
Speaker 3: that into the air and it flies like fifty, you know,
Speaker 3: fifty feet in the air. Because it's a big turkey
Speaker 3: feather shuttlecock, it kind of floats in the air. Everyone
Speaker 3: else have that laddle darts that have these wooden cross
Speaker 3: pegs on it that we throw at the shuttlecock as
Speaker 3: it's falling, and the cross pegs engage with a string
Speaker 3: that's on the shuttlecock tangles the string and pulls it down.
Speaker 3: So it's like it's like two thousand year old trap
Speaker 3: shooting with that laddle. It's incredible.
Speaker 1: My gosh, how do you make sure you don't bone
Speaker 1: each other in the face with them?
Speaker 3: Oh? Oh yeah, well, we have all these safety protocols.
Speaker 3: Everyone lines up and throws in the same direction, so
Speaker 3: there's nobody down range. But if you look up Mochitas
Speaker 3: on YouTube, there's actually a video of the World Little
Speaker 3: Association doing the Multitas experiment side by side with the
Speaker 3: paintings from the multi Civilization. It's a really cool video
Speaker 3: because it's like expremental archaeology in action. We have this
Speaker 3: picture of this ritual we don't understand. Well, let's try
Speaker 3: to figure it out. And we try to figure it out,
Speaker 3: and it seems to have worked.
Speaker 1: Okay. I looked at video of this and it involves
Speaker 1: one at lattle dart with a bouquet of stripey brown
Speaker 1: feathers on the end and a long string wound around
Speaker 1: the shaft, and then once it's launched, a row of
Speaker 1: like ten other at Little Darts, go Boy Young after
Speaker 1: it to see who can snag the string and how
Speaker 1: bananas that this was all the rage and then was
Speaker 1: just buried under millennia waiting to be re enacted.
Speaker 3: And now the Mulchitoss is a at Lattel competition that's
Speaker 3: part of almost every Atlattle tournament, every major out Littel
Speaker 3: tournament was one of the four main events of out
Speaker 3: Little tournaments when the WAA hosts host them.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's like and it's like the closest
Speaker 1: thing to having a time machine pretty much.
Speaker 3: Yeah, basically, I mean it felt so cool to be
Speaker 3: able to be part of this process of figuring out
Speaker 3: how this worked out. And again I didn't even when
Speaker 3: I was doing the experiment. I didn't really fully appreciate
Speaker 3: it until I saw the video after and it had
Speaker 3: those side by side comparisons and it was like, oh
Speaker 3: my gosh, we nailed it. We totally nailed it, nailed it.
Speaker 1: Okay, So now it's time for Angelo, your favorite experimental archaeologist,
Speaker 1: to nail a few Patreon questions that you' all threw
Speaker 1: and thrust it at him. But before we get to them,
Speaker 1: a word from word approved sponsors at the show who
Speaker 1: make it possible for us to donate to a cause
Speaker 1: of the ologists choosing. And this week it's an incredible
Speaker 1: mutual aid fund called the Black Trowel, which is a
Speaker 1: collective of archaeologists from PhD students to faculty members committed
Speaker 1: to the active support of archaeology students from working class
Speaker 1: and historically looted communities who require economic support. So Black
Speaker 1: Trial provides hookups to mentors and journal articles, as well
Speaker 1: as microgrants from five bucks to three hundred bucks. No
Speaker 1: questions asked two archaeology graduate and undergraduate students who need it,
Speaker 1: with students of color and those without parental or family
Speaker 1: support or who black access to other forms of financial
Speaker 1: aid by virtue of being undocumented to the front they say,
Speaker 1: so I dig them very much and Angelo is an
Speaker 1: angel for letting us know about them. So for more
Speaker 1: on this, check the link in the show notes, or
Speaker 1: you can go to Black Trowel Collective dot WordPress dot com.
Speaker 1: And that was made possible by sponsors of the show,
Speaker 1: who you may hear about now.
Speaker 2: Okay, get value you can't argue with at Tesco with
Speaker 2: their amazing club card prices. Serve up something special with
Speaker 2: our finest Meil deal for two starring one main, two
Speaker 2: sides and dessert for only sixteen euro like succulent Board,
Speaker 2: be approved Virus shinned to strip loin steaks with peppercorn
Speaker 2: butter or delicious Virus Chicken parmesanma served with creamy potato
Speaker 2: gritam and our mix of rainbow root vegetables and enjoy
Speaker 2: Goozillionaire or Soldier caramel cheesecake. Can't argue with that shop
Speaker 2: in store or online tesco.
Speaker 1: Every Little helps available to the most stores.
Speaker 2: Prices very and express.
Speaker 1: Let's get to a few Patreon questions in this whirlwind
Speaker 1: exploration of ancient tools. First question, this was asked by
Speaker 1: Ryley mckinnis, Joshua Read Britney Panos Sarah Kulig. Essentially, one
Speaker 1: want to know, they need to know. Do you play
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons and what class wouldn't at Little play
Speaker 1: as and what would be its cost in gold pieces?
Speaker 1: Do you play D and D? Yeah, your nay?
Speaker 3: I don't play D. I don't play D and D. However,
Speaker 3: I stocked Patreon questions ahead of time and I prepared
Speaker 3: an answer for this question. Because I knew it's the
Speaker 3: only one I wouldn't be able to answer off the top.
Speaker 1: Of Oh my goshold I pay, I'm such a dick.
Speaker 3: I don't I don't know. I don't know all the
Speaker 3: classes and stuff, but I will give what I think
Speaker 3: the stats for an atlatto would be in comparison to
Speaker 3: a sphere of javelin in a bow, because there are
Speaker 3: scientific studies comparing the four weapons. If we refer to
Speaker 3: a nineteen eighty six study by a non raiment about
Speaker 3: the effect of at loattle weights and force comparisons between
Speaker 3: bows and at laddle's and sphears and javelins, he found
Speaker 3: that the range for aut lattle would be in between
Speaker 3: a hand thrown spear slash, javelin and a bow. He
Speaker 3: also found that at lattle darks are are slower than
Speaker 3: bows and arrows, but have double the kinetic energy of
Speaker 3: self bows and longbows. Oh okay, bows aren't better across
Speaker 3: the board, but they're faster and wireless body movement, so
Speaker 3: they wouldn't scare pray as much. So basically, whatever you know,
Speaker 3: I'm sure bows and javelins are used in D and D.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure, but if they are you're going to
Speaker 3: look for something that has the range between a javelin
Speaker 3: and a bow, but double the impact force and damage
Speaker 3: potential of a bone arrow.
Speaker 1: Nice? Okay, D and d ers now have an answer
Speaker 1: for that. Perfect How many gold pieces? Let's just say five?
Speaker 1: I don't play d sure, fine, fine, five okay, Jen
Speaker 1: Woods first time question asker asked if I wanted to
Speaker 1: make one of these, how would I go about it?
Speaker 1: And is that a good idea or a terrible one?
Speaker 1: And side note Jen has done throwing knives and ax
Speaker 1: as in archery, so maybe those skills would overlap. And
Speaker 1: then Viddie pong to know. If I was marooned on
Speaker 1: an island that had game, animals and trees, how reasonable
Speaker 1: would it be for me to attempt to fashion myself
Speaker 1: and at lattle and hunt with it before starving to death?
Speaker 3: Great questions. At Laddles are way easier to make than
Speaker 3: bows and arrows. Okay, I was traded on deserted island,
Speaker 3: I would make myself in that lattle. Bows You have
Speaker 3: to make bowstring, you have to find the right wood,
Speaker 3: you have to shape the wood correctly. There's so much
Speaker 3: Bose are way more complicated and if you're in a
Speaker 3: survival situation, you don't have the time to make a
Speaker 3: bow at Laddles are a lot easier to make. Now
Speaker 3: doesn't mean that lattles are easy to make, they're just
Speaker 3: drastically easier to make and more reliable to make, you
Speaker 3: know what I mean, in that situation, So making that
Speaker 3: little great idea. Regardless of survival situation, everyone should make
Speaker 3: that little It's a lot of fun. They're pretty easy
Speaker 3: to make, especially if you're not going to do like
Speaker 3: a traditional method or make it out of stone tools.
Speaker 3: Just buy stuff at home depot, no big deal. The
Speaker 3: at laddle itself is the easy part. You can, you know, effectively,
Speaker 3: just a wood in two by four that you can
Speaker 3: hold comfortably with a nail in it or some sort
Speaker 3: of wooden peg as the hook. That's all you need
Speaker 3: for the laddle. The dart is the hard part. You
Speaker 3: need to have a dart that's flexible enough. When I
Speaker 3: made my first out laddle, I was maybe like eleven
Speaker 3: years old or something like that, eleven or twelve, so
Speaker 3: I was a lot smaller, and what I would use
Speaker 3: was four foot wooden dowels that were quarter inch diameter.
Speaker 3: I would make my own duct tape fletchings for the feathers,
Speaker 3: and I would tie a bunch of duct tape to
Speaker 3: the tip to make it front heavy, to give it
Speaker 3: enough weight, because I wasn't gonna put an actual, like
Speaker 3: metal tip on there. My parents were crazy enough to
Speaker 3: let an eleven year old make ancient weapons lgorad, were
Speaker 3: not crazy enough for me to actually to let me
Speaker 3: actually put real tips on them, which is good on
Speaker 3: their part, to be honest. So yeah, so that's what
Speaker 3: I did. And those quarter inch dowels are definitely like
Speaker 3: flexible enough, they would work pretty well. If you're going
Speaker 3: to make them just sound like out of a stick,
Speaker 3: you're gonna want to dry the stick out, peel away
Speaker 3: all the bark, heat the stick over a fire. When
Speaker 3: you heat something wood over fire, you can actually bend it.
Speaker 3: It's really pliable. You'd be surprised how pliable wood is
Speaker 3: when it gets hot. And so that's how you would
Speaker 3: straighten it. And both ancient times and now you straightened
Speaker 3: with the same way. So you heat your stick over
Speaker 3: a dowel and just press, you know, slowly press and
Speaker 3: bend it against the whatever bend or you know, bend
Speaker 3: it has in it, straighten it out, and you just
Speaker 3: want to make sure that it's thin and flexible. Now
Speaker 3: there's kind of a hack. It doesn't have to be
Speaker 3: as thin. Is if it's really long. For example, if
Speaker 3: I have like a quarter inch steel bar, yeah that's
Speaker 3: not going to be flexible. But if that quarter of
Speaker 3: steel bar was a mile long, it's definitely going to
Speaker 3: be flexible. So any material at a certain length becomes
Speaker 3: flexible no matter the thickness. So if you're like, well,
Speaker 3: I don't really have any thin sticks or thin branches
Speaker 3: or whatever, we'll just make a really thick dart, or
Speaker 3: make a thick dart that's maybe like an ancient diameter,
Speaker 3: but make it seven or nine feet long instead of
Speaker 3: five or six feet long.
Speaker 1: Okay, gosh, that's smart. PS, if you are right now
Speaker 1: plotting to make ancient weapons in your driveway, feel free
Speaker 1: to do just a tiny imperceptible butt dance in solidarity
Speaker 1: and in celebration. Also just little dad word advice and
Speaker 1: a legal disclaimer. Please do not accidentally kill each other
Speaker 1: with these things, thank you. But with some of Angelo's advice,
Speaker 1: you're just gonna be a chip off the old black
Speaker 1: Oh I mean speaking of that. Clara Law is a
Speaker 1: first time question asker and a future archaeologist who had
Speaker 1: great questions. One of them was what is the best
Speaker 1: type of rock or your favorite rock to make weapons
Speaker 1: or tools out of?
Speaker 3: So my favorite type is obsidian because because it's so brittle,
Speaker 3: it's easier to flake and flint n app Also, obsidian
Speaker 3: comes in a wide variety of colors and shades that
Speaker 3: makes it really pretty. So there's like mahogany of cidian,
Speaker 3: which is brown, black and red speckle. There's snowflake of
Speaker 3: citian which has white speckles. There's rainbow of city, and
Speaker 3: there's green up city in even like translucent bandit of
Speaker 3: city in all of which I've made stone tools out
Speaker 3: of at some point. And yeah, so that's something my
Speaker 3: favorite because I think it looks the nicest. It's also
Speaker 3: one of the easier stones to make tools out of
Speaker 3: because it's so brittle it breaks pretty easy. That also means, however,
Speaker 3: that it potentially could break in half while you're working
Speaker 3: on it, which isn't great. And I'm not sure there's
Speaker 3: there's an answer to the best type of rock, because
Speaker 3: they each have their drawbacks. Like I mentioned, Obcitian is
Speaker 3: really sharp, but it's fragile and brittle. Shirt and flint
Speaker 3: are not as sharp, but they're much more durable. So
Speaker 3: it's just a trade off. It's whatever you're looking for,
Speaker 3: you know, whatever works best for your situation.
Speaker 1: Related Kimberly McCall had asked, what's the best stone for
Speaker 1: edged weapons? And why is it obsidian? So I believe
Speaker 1: that you've just answered answered that too at point to point.
Speaker 3: It's not necessarily it's not necessarily obsidian. While obsidian is
Speaker 3: very good for edged weapons, it's not necessarily the best
Speaker 3: for edge weapons. You'll notice a lot of archaeologists don't
Speaker 3: and anthropolgists don't like to make determinations of you know,
Speaker 3: best or quality, because then you get into those issues
Speaker 3: where you're calling some other culture or people's not less
Speaker 3: than or primitive or not as advanced, when that's not
Speaker 3: necessarily true. Like Zeleia Latall proved with the at Lattles,
Speaker 3: just because something is older doesn't necessarily mean it's a
Speaker 3: lesson or inferior weapon. There's no such thing as the
Speaker 3: best weapon. It's it's our best tool. It's whatever is
Speaker 3: works for that environment. And you know, bos aren't automatically
Speaker 3: better than at lattles. At lattels are automatically better than bos,
Speaker 3: they're both better than each other at specific tasks.
Speaker 1: And actually, on the topic of zilia, Nikki de Marco
Speaker 1: and Jena Mace wanted to know if there were weapons
Speaker 1: made for women and if there's anything you've discovered on
Speaker 1: the history of female hunting or weapon use.
Speaker 3: Really good question that it's been theorized that at laddles
Speaker 3: are the most egalitarian weapon, which means that because it you,
Speaker 3: this is a mechanical advantage over your arm. It doesn't
Speaker 3: matter how strong you are. It's more of a finesse
Speaker 3: weapon than a strength weapon, which means that children and
Speaker 3: women potentially could have used them and use them to
Speaker 3: hunt as well. However, there's not necessarily evidence of that.
Speaker 3: It's just again something that's possible. So I'm not sure
Speaker 3: you know whether there's evidence of a female hunters, but
Speaker 3: definitely with that laddle compared to most other weapons, it's
Speaker 3: possible that that women hunted.
Speaker 1: Ladies carve those at lattles. Now, on that note, Patron
Speaker 1: Richard asked, have archaeologists found any kid size weapons, either
Speaker 1: doll sized or training like mini at laddles or bows.
Speaker 1: So if this is more of a finesse weapon rather
Speaker 1: than a strength weapon, could little kiddos be having little
Speaker 1: baby at laddles and trying to get little tiny baby targets.
Speaker 3: Yes. In fact, recently we found child sized at laddles
Speaker 3: in Oregon and this was excavated by the University of Alberta,
Speaker 3: and they found that the biggest at laddle was one
Speaker 3: hundred and sixty six percent larger than the smallest at laddle,
Speaker 3: which is greater than the range of hand sizes for
Speaker 3: adult humans. So they figured like, okay, well it might
Speaker 3: have been children that have used at lattles. I have
Speaker 3: personally taught children as young as second grade, which I'm
Speaker 3: not sure how what was that six or seven years old?
Speaker 1: I think. So.
Speaker 3: There's an elementary school here in Las Vegas and every
Speaker 3: year for like three years they've had me come doing
Speaker 3: at Lattle throwing workshop with their second graders. You can
Speaker 3: find pictures of this on my Instagram. It's adorable. What
Speaker 3: I did was we made at lattle darts with nerf
Speaker 3: foam tips. I built a giant ten by ten mammoth
Speaker 3: target for them to throw at, and we built tiny
Speaker 3: little child sized at laddles out of paint stisticks from
Speaker 3: home depot, Oh my god. And the class part of
Speaker 3: their social studies unit is learning about ice age humans.
Speaker 3: So I come in. I do like a little like
Speaker 3: maybe like a forty five minute lecture where I passed
Speaker 3: around some arrowheads, some you know, some atlatte points. I
Speaker 3: pass around some vegetable cordage that I made. It's a
Speaker 3: rope made out of yucca fibers. I kind of talk
Speaker 3: to them about what ancient life specifically around hunting was
Speaker 3: like for I say, humans, and we go outside. I
Speaker 3: teach them how to process their own plant fibers to
Speaker 3: make rope, and then I teach them how to twist
Speaker 3: throw a rope, and usually parents have to help because
Speaker 3: seven year olds don't have the greatest dexterity, tiny little
Speaker 3: lambs and feet. And then we walk over to the
Speaker 3: atlattle target and I let them all throw. They have
Speaker 3: like an hour to throw at lattles, and it's like
Speaker 3: some of them, it's crazy how instinctive at lottle throwing
Speaker 3: can be. Some of them have a really hard time
Speaker 3: with it. But then there's every single year there's like
Speaker 3: three or four of these seven year olds who start
Speaker 3: throwing throwing like they've been throwing for a decade. They
Speaker 3: start throwing as good as I am, and I've been
Speaker 3: throwing for a deck. So sometimes like it just clicks
Speaker 3: with some people and it's completely like it doesn't matter
Speaker 3: whether it's like a boy or a girl. I've had
Speaker 3: girls throw amazingly well and boys threw amazing well, Like
Speaker 3: it has literally nothing to do with that, which is
Speaker 3: another point towards it being in a galitarian weapon. It's
Speaker 3: a finesse weapon. But yeah, these kids can sometimes throw
Speaker 3: incredibly well and incredible distances, even though they're using small
Speaker 3: at lattles. And the cool thing about that the child
Speaker 3: at laddles that were found in Oregon is that they
Speaker 3: were made out of whalebones, so that the children's sized
Speaker 3: ones were made out of whalebone, but the adult sized
Speaker 3: ones were made out of wood. So not really entirely
Speaker 3: sure what that's about, but it seems like we have
Speaker 3: a lot of the child sized ones because the bone
Speaker 3: doesn't deteriorate as much or as fast as the wood does,
Speaker 3: so we find more of these these, you know, children
Speaker 3: sized at laddles.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wonder if they were also passed down, you know,
Speaker 1: from child to child as they outgrew them or something perhaps.
Speaker 3: And the cool thing is the ones in an organ.
Speaker 3: They were that split finger style that reduces the strain
Speaker 3: of the elbow that we more typically associate with groups
Speaker 3: that used at laddles further south, like in Arizona or
Speaker 3: in you know, Texas or northern Mexico, but it's the
Speaker 3: style that we actually see as far north as Oregon
Speaker 3: as well. At the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Speaker 3: Ethnology in Boston, Massachusetts, there is a display of artifacts
Speaker 3: from the Northwest coast. And these artifacts are both like
Speaker 3: you know, prehistoric artifacts that were excavated and historic artifacts
Speaker 3: that were probably stolen from natives in that area or
Speaker 3: indigenous people in that area, as depressing as that is.
Speaker 3: And one of these artifacts is a canoe action figure
Speaker 3: with two or three people sitting in it. And one
Speaker 3: of the little action figure people sitting in the canoe
Speaker 3: is holding in that laddle and using it to hunt
Speaker 3: like a seal or a whale. That adorable thing.
Speaker 1: But is that hard to do sitting down?
Speaker 3: It's so hard to do sitting down actually, so one
Speaker 3: of my closest friends in the Atlatto community is named
Speaker 3: doctor I think he has I'm pretty sure he has PhD.
Speaker 3: Doctor Richard vander Hook.
Speaker 1: He does, indeed, I checked.
Speaker 3: He is the state archaeologist of Alaska. He specializes in
Speaker 3: Arctic Circle at Lattle's. He's studied Arctic Circle at Lottels
Speaker 3: more than anybody else. So all these different throwing board
Speaker 3: styles that are only found in the Arctic Circle. And
Speaker 3: he has this public demonstration he does where he has
Speaker 3: this like kind of fake canoe frame and then he
Speaker 3: uses a python it's very painted brown to be like
Speaker 3: a sealhead, and he has participants try to sit and
Speaker 3: throw in a Lattle sitting. And the other thing is
Speaker 3: when you're aiming at like something like a sealhead instead
Speaker 3: of throwing at a standing target like a mammoth, where
Speaker 3: you're standing and the target standing, So you're kind of
Speaker 3: able to conceptualize that frame of reference when you're when
Speaker 3: you're throwing at something that's swimming, it's you know, you're
Speaker 3: above the water and you're throwing. You're trying to arc
Speaker 3: something to hit effectively the quote unquote ground. Right, The
Speaker 3: water's not the ground, but it's that plane of the ground.
Speaker 3: It's a completely different aiming system because you're not trying
Speaker 3: to hit a standing target. You're trying to arc something
Speaker 3: to hit a seal that's like in under the water
Speaker 3: that's out in front of you. Crazy different, really difficult.
Speaker 3: So he brought that setup to the value of Fire
Speaker 3: at Laddle tournament that is hosted here in Las Vegas
Speaker 3: every year for the past thirty years, and he brought
Speaker 3: that set up last year for people to try to
Speaker 3: throw sitting down and we're talking here. We have world
Speaker 3: champion at loaddle throwers who have ninety five plus percent
Speaker 3: accuracy at any distance under twenty five meters, and they
Speaker 3: were having so much difficulty throwing sitting it's like you
Speaker 3: just change that and something people who've been throwing for
Speaker 3: decades have trouble. But yeah, child at Laddel's child at
Speaker 3: Lattle action figures somehow, you know, more prevalent in the
Speaker 3: Northwest coast. We haven't really found evidence of that elsewhere,
Speaker 3: but we found evidence of that in the Northwest coast.
Speaker 1: And a Valerie wants to know if I find an
Speaker 1: arrowhead on a walk, am I required to leave it
Speaker 1: or turn it into a museum? And Anna says, I
Speaker 1: collected a bunch of our property as I can. And
Speaker 1: now I'm wondering if that was super illegal, what are
Speaker 1: the ethics, what's the protocol there?
Speaker 3: Okay, so definitely leave it unless you are very specific circumstances.
Speaker 3: So in general, all archaeological remains are protected in the
Speaker 3: United States. If it is on public land and you
Speaker 3: disturb it, it is I think it's a felony. There's
Speaker 3: a fine associated with it, and there's different amounts of
Speaker 3: fines for different types of artifacts. If you are in
Speaker 3: private property, it is technically not illegal. And also there
Speaker 3: are some states that allow arrowhead or artifact collecting on
Speaker 3: public property if it's part of like an erosion, so
Speaker 3: like on a riverbank, where the remains probably aren't the
Speaker 3: original context anyway, They were probably removed by the river,
Speaker 3: so you can pick them up, but that's a state
Speaker 3: by state basis. In general, leave them alone. The reason
Speaker 3: is because in archaeology we get data not from the
Speaker 3: artifact itself, but from what's around the artifact where it
Speaker 3: was found. Oh, and that's called the archaeological context. And
Speaker 3: the context gives you vastly more data than the tool itself.
Speaker 3: For example, Let's say you find an arrowhead, you pick
Speaker 3: it up, and you bring it to a museum. Well,
Speaker 3: you probably didn't take GPS coordinates of exactly where you
Speaker 3: picked it up. And if I look at the arrowhead,
Speaker 3: I'm like, okay, well it's an arrowhead. But if that
Speaker 3: arrowhead was still left where it was and I was
Speaker 3: able to, you know, I or another archaeologist was able
Speaker 3: to go see it in its context, we might be
Speaker 3: able to look at the site and say, Okay, this
Speaker 3: arrowhead was found next to bones of this type of animal.
Speaker 3: It was found next to a fire hearth, so maybe
Speaker 3: this was where a hunt happened. They process the animal
Speaker 3: here and there, built a fire, cooked it and ate
Speaker 3: it and left, and they left the arrowhead behind. So
Speaker 3: now I have way more information about what that arrowhead
Speaker 3: was used for based on what was found around the
Speaker 3: arrowhead and very little information from the arrowhead itself besides
Speaker 3: the fact that it's an arrowhead.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: That's why places like rivers where artifacts have already been
Speaker 3: moved out of their context are legal to pick up
Speaker 3: in some states, because they recognize that leaving it be
Speaker 3: doesn't really do anything anyway, because it's already been disturbed
Speaker 3: by the river. Some might as well just pick it up,
Speaker 3: but again that's a state by state basis, and I
Speaker 3: would rather just leave them behind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is it helpful a little to take a picture
Speaker 1: and drop a pin at all?
Speaker 3: Or no? You could let notify your local anthropology department
Speaker 3: or your local natural history museum or every single state,
Speaker 3: required by law, has to have a state Historic Preservation
Speaker 3: Office with a state Historic Preservation Officer who is in
Speaker 3: charge of all historic and archaeological remains and sites for
Speaker 3: that state. So you could always let that. That's literally
Speaker 3: it's their job to keep track of which archaeological sites
Speaker 3: are which and where in your state. There's a chance
Speaker 3: they probably already know about that site, especially if you're
Speaker 3: on like, oh, well trodden path or hiking trail. But
Speaker 3: there's a chance if you're like out in the back
Speaker 3: country somewhere and you find something, leave it be, try
Speaker 3: to drop a GPS pan if you can, and let
Speaker 3: somebody at the state Historic Preservation office know, and they
Speaker 3: can send out an archaeologist to see if it's a
Speaker 3: you know, if it's a sight or not. But that's
Speaker 3: definitely something you can do.
Speaker 1: You can notify cool Asia wants to know how much
Speaker 1: do you love Forged in Fire? And Christine Hottinger wants
Speaker 1: to know, relatedly, what do you hate about forged in Fire?
Speaker 1: Also my question what is forged in Fire?
Speaker 3: So forgu and Fire is a TV show?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 3: Or blacksmiths have competitions who can make the best slash,
Speaker 3: strongest sword or knife or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: M I'm going to make a seven layer bar.
Speaker 1: I always make a seven layer bar for the center
Speaker 1: of my swords because I'm.
Speaker 3: A war here. They're not necessarily making historical recreations. I
Speaker 3: don't watch the show. I just know what the show is.
Speaker 3: I think I've seen maybe one episode, but I have
Speaker 3: no thoughts about it. Blacksmithing and metallurgy or metalwork is
Speaker 3: definitely not my specialty. I know, you know cursory information
Speaker 3: about Bronze Age, Iron Age or even medieval weaponry, and
Speaker 3: you know stuff like that, but it's not my specialty.
Speaker 3: It's not what I've studied on an academic level. It's
Speaker 3: kind of just a hobby.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen an at lattle in a movie
Speaker 1: or TV show? Have there been any movies about them?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: What's the deal.
Speaker 3: Okay, so I'm so excited. There is a movie about
Speaker 3: at Lattle's that comes out August fourteenth. I don't know
Speaker 3: when this episode's going to air, so it's probably yeah,
Speaker 3: August fourteenth. It's called The Silencing. It stars Nikolaike coster Waldou,
Speaker 3: who is the actor from Game of Thrones who played
Speaker 3: one of the Lanisters. In real life. Nicolai coster Waldo
Speaker 3: is in at lattel user. He pulled most videos of
Speaker 3: him using at ladders on his property on Instagram. You
Speaker 3: can go on Instagram you can find his outladdle posts. No,
Speaker 3: I don't know whether he started using at laddle after
Speaker 3: filming this movie or somebody decided to write this movie
Speaker 3: for him because he uses lottels. I don't know. But
Speaker 3: the movie is about a guy who kidnaps people and
Speaker 3: sets them loose into forest and hunts them with an
Speaker 3: aut laddle. Nikolai Costa Wallo plays the good guy who's
Speaker 3: trying to hunt the hunter.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, Okay, of course I look this up
Speaker 1: and the trailer already has well over a million views,
Speaker 1: and one of the top comments reads, producers, how many
Speaker 1: times can you cut the word at little into the
Speaker 1: trailer trailer guy.
Speaker 3: Yes, seriously, if you watch the trailer, they say the
Speaker 3: word at Laddle like ten times. It's insane. At Laddle
Speaker 3: is a main character of the movie. Even I was
Speaker 3: showing my parents this and then they're like, Okay, we
Speaker 3: thought when you said there's a movie about it Laddle's
Speaker 3: we thought you were over exaggerating. We thought that there's
Speaker 3: a movie that had one scene within that laddle. We
Speaker 3: didn't think like the trailer depicts this whole scene where
Speaker 3: the police have to go to an experimental archaeologist to
Speaker 3: ask what that lattle is?
Speaker 1: What do you think he used? Called ain no toy
Speaker 1: designed to kill me?
Speaker 3: And the experimental archaeologists explain this is in the trailer,
Speaker 3: he's explaining and demonstrating that battle use and how powerful
Speaker 3: he throws it against like a pig carcass or something,
Speaker 3: and like just shows how powerful it is. And half
Speaker 3: the movie is then figuring out like what in that
Speaker 3: lattle is because they find these these wounds on these
Speaker 3: bodies and they're like, what the hell? What kind of
Speaker 3: tool made this wound? Like nobody knows what it is,
Speaker 3: And it turns out it's a guy in a full
Speaker 3: gilly suit, hiding camouflage in the woods, hunting people, that lattles.
Speaker 3: The whole movie's about it, Lettle. It's crazy. It's crazy.
Speaker 3: So it comes out August fourteenth on all streaming platforms. No,
Speaker 3: I believe it's already out. If you have direct TV?
Speaker 1: How are you gonna celebrate wrong?
Speaker 4: How are you?
Speaker 1: Are you gonna wear a gilly suit? What are you
Speaker 1: gonna do?
Speaker 3: I'm I'm gonna have a watch party at my house,
Speaker 3: And like, I am so excited because this is the
Speaker 3: out lott of representation in media that I've been waiting for,
Speaker 3: and the fact that they seem to be pronouncing it correctly.
Speaker 3: The representation of the lattle seems accurate. I actually know
Speaker 3: the guy who made the at laddles for the movie.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: That's another thing. If anyone wants to buy out Laddles,
Speaker 3: there's a few pretty good vendors. The only thing you
Speaker 3: have to look out for is making sure that the
Speaker 3: dart is flexible enough. I usually whenever I buy somebody
Speaker 3: else's atladdle darts, I will usually like taper them myselves
Speaker 3: make them a little bit better. But anyway, this company
Speaker 3: named at Laddle Madness is the ones who supplied the
Speaker 3: laddles for the movie, and they look great. The movie
Speaker 3: looks great. It looks accurate, like it's it's great. It's phenomenal.
Speaker 1: Dude, I'm so pumped for you. I am so pumped
Speaker 1: for you. I'm also excited to watch this.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, the trailer alone is wild, Like I can't
Speaker 3: even imagine how crazy the movie's gonna because the trailer
Speaker 3: like gave me goosebumps from an auttle perspective already, I'm
Speaker 3: so excited.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is gonna be a hard question. What sucks
Speaker 1: does anything? What is or what is obviously irksome about
Speaker 1: your job?
Speaker 3: I think it goes back to like flim flam whenever
Speaker 3: I see in a movie a you know, quote unquote
Speaker 3: caveman throwing a spear that's like would have been a
Speaker 3: thrusting spear and they throw it and because of the
Speaker 3: movie special effects, it goes like seventy feet at like
Speaker 3: sixty miles an hour, perfectly straight and zips through the
Speaker 3: air and kills a mammoth or something like that. Uh huh,
Speaker 3: I cringe. Spears are for thrusting out. Laddles are for
Speaker 3: throwing you Like it's not post. You know, there's no
Speaker 3: no experiment that shows that you can throw a hand
Speaker 3: thrown spear, especially like the ones that show in movies,
Speaker 3: any more than twenty meters. And even at twenty meters,
Speaker 3: achestrae is low, impact, velocity is low, the damage is
Speaker 3: not that bad, is not that great. And if you're
Speaker 3: hunting a mammoth, you're not throwing a spear like that.
Speaker 3: You're definitely using that laddle. So whenever I see flim flam,
Speaker 3: I you know, that kind of stuff kind of irks me.
Speaker 3: And the other thing is, uh, I mean at laddles
Speaker 3: are because at lattle is a Nawak word in academia,
Speaker 3: it's not really used to describe the tool itself because
Speaker 3: it was used by so many different cultures. So it's
Speaker 3: called a spear thrower in academia. And because at lattles
Speaker 3: throw darks, not spears, I kind of cringe at that
Speaker 3: time as well.
Speaker 1: So spears can be used for stabbing, which at little
Speaker 1: darts are kind of too flexy for and darts have
Speaker 1: fletching or feathers on the ass end, so so fancy,
Speaker 1: although it's a pretty broad term a dart.
Speaker 3: Because if I told people that I throw darts, they
Speaker 3: think that I am then a pub somewhere in the UK, and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: So the reason the darts that we throw at dart
Speaker 3: boards are even called darks is because it comes from
Speaker 3: a Roman thing called a plumbata, which is basically a
Speaker 3: giant that they would throw underhand. It would go up
Speaker 3: into the air with a big lead weight and feathers
Speaker 3: in the back, and then like a lawn dart, it
Speaker 3: kind of like just drops straight now over shield walls.
Speaker 3: And if you look at a plumbata, if you like
Speaker 3: look at it looks exactly like just a big version
Speaker 3: of a of a throwing dart. But the dart part
Speaker 3: comes from the fact that it has fletchings, because a
Speaker 3: spear or a javelin doesn't have fletchings, but but darts
Speaker 3: do have fletchings. So anyway that I kind of cringe
Speaker 3: at those two things calling it a spear thrower, even
Speaker 3: though I have to because that's the correct academic term
Speaker 3: for it. And whenever I see a movie where somebody
Speaker 3: throws a spear a bajillion miles an hour, I'm like, Nope,
Speaker 3: that's not how that works at all.
Speaker 1: Uh, difficult question you know what it is? It's your
Speaker 1: favorite thing about at els? How are you? How are
Speaker 1: you gonna pick?
Speaker 3: How do you? Yeah? The last the last two hours
Speaker 3: of this interview is my favorite part. There's nothing, there's
Speaker 3: no bad like. It's the craziest, coolest thing that no one,
Speaker 3: the very few people are aware of or have heard of.
Speaker 1: That's correct. We recorded a two hour interview and then
Speaker 1: we chatted another forty five minutes afterward. And yes, this
Speaker 1: was very hard to cut down because this dude has
Speaker 1: so much knowledge in his brain bowl.
Speaker 3: And you know what, I have an answer. My favorite
Speaker 3: thing not about aut Lattels, but about what I do
Speaker 3: with at Lattels and what my role is as a
Speaker 3: board member for the World at Lottel Association. The education
Speaker 3: outreach that I get to do is my favorite part
Speaker 3: about archaeology. I am most comfortable teaching people about things
Speaker 3: that I'm passionate about, and there's nothing I'm more passionate
Speaker 3: about than at lattles. And I love teaching people about
Speaker 3: little so I have done at lattle throwing workshops for
Speaker 3: elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, university groups, museums, the
Speaker 3: Bureau Land Management, the State Park Service the State Historic
Speaker 3: Preservation Office. Anytime I can tell a group of people
Speaker 3: about at lottles and teach them how to throw it,
Speaker 3: especially when it's little kids whose eyes just light up
Speaker 3: when they learn about a weapon they've never heard about
Speaker 3: and they have the ability to throw a small little spear,
Speaker 3: small little dart like fifty, you know, fifty sixty seventy
Speaker 3: feet with this little tool, and their eyes just light up.
Speaker 3: And that's the best part teaching people. Having the public
Speaker 3: interaction is the best part, because I think that, you know,
Speaker 3: science without communication, science without education is pointless. The reason
Speaker 3: we do science is in order to create a better society,
Speaker 3: in order to educate the public, and science communication is
Speaker 3: my favorite part of what I do.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's also great when you're going out there,
Speaker 1: you're in the desert, you're just getting out of the car,
Speaker 1: you got a bunch of darts, and you're just ready
Speaker 1: to like kind of practice. That's got to be so fun.
Speaker 3: It's so much fun. I always get so many weird
Speaker 3: looks when when I roll out to places like there's
Speaker 3: like a public twelve month period where I had an
Speaker 3: at lettl and like three darts in my car perpetually
Speaker 3: just stretched over the entirety of my sedan, and anywhere
Speaker 3: I would go people were like, what is in your car?
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, there are thirty thousand year old
Speaker 3: throwing spears, but don't worry about it.
Speaker 1: Let's hear a little bit more about this sedan. The
Speaker 1: at little the hickeel.
Speaker 3: So my license plate says at Laddle is a gift
Speaker 3: from my sister. Love it. So you can catch me
Speaker 3: driving around Las Vegas with the Outlattle car wearing my
Speaker 3: lattele t shirts. The funny thing is I actually had
Speaker 3: a friend who called me once and said, you wouldn't
Speaker 3: believe I was just at the mall and I saw
Speaker 3: a car without lott of license plates. That means that
Speaker 3: there's somebody else in Las Vegas besides you who throws
Speaker 3: out laddles. And I said, why would that be your
Speaker 3: first conclusion? Why would you not just assume that that
Speaker 3: was my car? I was like, you, you went to
Speaker 3: like the extremely unlikely scenario that there's somebody else as
Speaker 3: at Laddle obsessed as me who got a lot of
Speaker 3: license plates, instead of just assuming that it was me
Speaker 3: who was driving that car and it and it was
Speaker 3: me that's the best.
Speaker 1: So if you're ever in southern Nevada and you see
Speaker 1: an at lettle Sedanda's BBEPI hi.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep, I've gotten uh, definitely weird looks. A lot
Speaker 3: of people think that I'm like in Atlanta Falcons or
Speaker 3: Atlanta Braves fan because at l a tl but.
Speaker 1: Right, Nope, nope, it's out ladders.
Speaker 3: It's ancient, ancient throwing weapons.
Speaker 1: Well, you won't be alone. I think after this episode
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people who are gonna be pumped
Speaker 1: about at lettles, myself include so.
Speaker 3: I hope so. And if anybody is making or throwing
Speaker 3: it out lattles, they have questions, they want to talk
Speaker 3: to me about it attles more. There's nothing more I
Speaker 3: loved than talkout lettles. So I am available. My dms
Speaker 3: are open for any allatt related questions.
Speaker 1: Uh, that's great. You're gonna watch out. You're gonna get
Speaker 1: a uh yep barage. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I also, Hey, I also do ax throwing and knife throwing,
Speaker 3: and I throw slings and I make my own slings
Speaker 3: as well, So I, you know, do a little bit
Speaker 3: of everything.
Speaker 1: I think one thing that's really admirable about you too
Speaker 1: is that you really do put yourself out there in
Speaker 1: a way that lets these opportunities kind of open up
Speaker 1: to you. That's really infectious. I think that's such a
Speaker 1: good lesson.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you. I like to pride myself about like
Speaker 3: my passion for things is my favorite part about myself.
Speaker 3: I just dive, I dive deep, and I just want
Speaker 3: to share that with as many people as possible.
Speaker 1: You do a very good job. I'm so excited to
Speaker 1: watch this ad a lot. Now, this a little movie
Speaker 1: is gonna be so good. So ask smart people's stupid
Speaker 1: questions about their obsessions and before you know your carbon
Speaker 1: stuff in the backyard and watching horror Flix involving a
Speaker 1: man in a moss covered wan. Say now for more napped,
Speaker 1: obsidian and elegantly chucked weaponry, follow Angela on Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 1: He's that I dig it first with a one for
Speaker 1: the first. You can check out the World at Lettle
Speaker 1: Association at world at little dot org. You can also
Speaker 1: check out Angelo's podcast, which is not at all about
Speaker 1: at Lottles, but rather about his other passion, which is
Speaker 1: samples and pop music, and it's called Sample Excavator's at
Speaker 1: sample Excavator on Twitter, and Instagram. It's wonderful and that
Speaker 1: movie is The Silencing and it's out August fourteenth. We
Speaker 1: make zero dollars off of talking about it. Just a
Speaker 1: thought it. It was interesting And for more links to
Speaker 1: all of this, you can see aliward dot com slash
Speaker 1: Ologies slash Experimental Archaeology and there's going to be a
Speaker 1: link to that in the show notes, as well as
Speaker 1: to the Black Trial Collective. And we are at ologies
Speaker 1: on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at ali Ward with one
Speaker 1: L on both ologies. Merch is at Ologiesmarch dot com
Speaker 1: and we have all manner of ways to show your
Speaker 1: ologies love. Thank you to Shannon Feldsabonni Dutch, two sisters
Speaker 1: who hosts the comedy podcast To You are That for
Speaker 1: managing our merch. Thank you Eron Talbert for admitting the
Speaker 1: Ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Emily White and
Speaker 1: all the Ologies podcast transcribers and Caleb Patten who bleeps
Speaker 1: the episodes. Transcripts and kids Safe Bleeped episodes are up
Speaker 1: for free at aliward dot com slash Ologies Dash Extras.
Speaker 1: There's a link to that in the show notes too.
Speaker 1: Thank you Noel Dilworth, who gets all the interviews scheduled
Speaker 1: and more, and to assistant editor mister Jared Sleeper, who
Speaker 1: hosts the mental health podcast in a Good Bad Brain
Speaker 1: and who absolutely wants to go to the desert and
Speaker 1: fling these things, and to the fletchings on our darts,
Speaker 1: Stephen Ray Morris, who is a lead editor. He also
Speaker 1: hosts the podcast The per Cast about kiddies and see
Speaker 1: Jurassic Write about Dinosaurs and Nick Thorburn wrote and performed
Speaker 1: theme music. And if you stick around the end of
Speaker 1: the episode, you know I tell you a secret. And
Speaker 1: this week's secret is that if you can hear any
Speaker 1: bumping upstairs, that's my parents. We're getting ready to go
Speaker 1: to the doctor to take my dad get the staples
Speaker 1: out and they are waiting for me and I have
Speaker 1: about two minutes to get up there and out into
Speaker 1: the car. Okay, next week see then, yeah, how gamer.
Speaker 4: Bye ooh, I'm gonna grib you sweaty here.
Speaker 2: Get value you can't argue with at Tesco with their
Speaker 2: amazing club card prices. Serve up something special with our
Speaker 2: finest meal deal for two starring one main, two sides
Speaker 2: and dessert for only sixteen euro Like succulent board, be
Speaker 2: approved Virushanger strip loin steaks with pepper corn butter, or
Speaker 2: delicious firous chicken Parmeshama served with creamy potato cretame and
Speaker 2: our mix of rainbow root vegetables and enjoyed Goozillionaire or
Speaker 2: Soldier caramel cheesecake. Can't argue with that shop in store
Speaker 2: or online Tesco. Every Little helps available the most stores.
Speaker 2: Prices very in express