How Ancient Dart Launchers Changed the Game for Early Female Hunters [View all]

A female archaeologist is challenging the idea of men as hunters and women as gatherers, one throw at a time.

BY ROXANNE HOORN
SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

THE SUBTLETIES OF WOMEN HAVE long baffled men. Take anthropologist William Webb. In the 1940s, he was briefly perplexed to find hunting tools in the ancient graves of women. Webb, then head of the department of archaeology and anthropology at the University of Kentucky, was investigating the Indian Knoll site, from the Late Archaic Period (5,000 to 3,000 years ago). He concluded that the hunting gear—in this case an atlatl, or spear-thrower—must have been placed there by husbands, or because they made pretty hair ornaments.

“It is hardly to be supposed that … women would have any practical use in life for an atlatl … such occurrences represent true burial offerings to the dead of artifacts primarily intended for the use of men,” Webb wrote in 1946.

Webb, a white cis-man, was operating off a long-held assumption of a male-dominated field: Men hunt, women gather.

“There’s a lot of assumptions about gender roles in archaeology that really aren’t supported,” says Metin Eren, an experimental archaeologist at Kent State University in Ohio. “The reason why we have assumptions about gender roles is because it was males over the 20th century that made those assumptions. It’s important to give preeminence to evidence and not assumption.”

According to recent evidence, including a new study in Science Reports, there’s no reason to think that ancient women didn’t use hunting gear to deadly effect. As early as 22,000 years ago, communities of hunters on every continent except Africa (though this may be due to lack of archaeological evidence on what would be a much older timeline) shifted from throwing spears like javelins to using the atlatl, a kind of handle that uses leverage to propel a spear farther and faster. For the current study, researchers got 108 people to throw spears various ways. When it came to throwing like a javelin, males outperformed females. But when an atlatl was involved, that difference all but disappeared. The findings support the “atlatl equalizer hypothesis,” posited by researchers John Whitacker and Kathy Kamp at Grinnell College in Iowa, which states that strategic leverage might have made hunting a practice for everyone in an ancient community.

More:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/early-women-hunt-too