Ologies with Alie Ward - Experimental Archaeology (OLD TOOLS/ATLATLS) with Angelo Robledo

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

Spears! Sharp rocks! Ancient blades, bows and arrows and ...atlatls? What’s an atlatl? Experimental Archaeologist and decades-long ancient tool enthusiast Angelo Robledo is as passionate as an ologist can get. You likely have never heard of an atlatl, but by the end of the episode you’ll be carving one out of old lumber. Also covered: early axes, Indigenous traditions of Central and South America, ancient graffiti, tales of field work, archeology heroes, what to do if you find artifacts on a hike, and the physics of how far you can lob ancient weaponry, plus: the World Atlatl Association. Follow Angelo Robledo at Twitter.com/idigit1st or Instagram.com/idigit1st Check out the World Atlatl Association at WorldAtlAtl.org A donation went to Black Trowel Collective:https://blacktrowelcollective.wordpress.com/ Listen to Angelo's podcast, Sample Excavator Instagram.com/sampleexcavator and Twitter.com/sampleexcavator For more links: alieward.com/ologies/experimentalarchaeology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and uh...bikinis? Hi. Yes. Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's that tattered Halloween wig you know is going to come in handy someday. Alleyward, back with another episode of Allergies. Okay, this one's big. If you have come to rely on Allergies for very detailed, very weird information about stuff that you never knew existed and some historical gossip and strangers, unbridled passions making you feel okay about being alive, hot diggity dam, this is an episode that you may just cherish forever. So hop of the jeep, head tight.

This is about to be a journey. Okay, but first, a few thanks. Thank you to everyone in the Patreon Club for supporting at like a dollar a month or more that gets you in. You can submit questions to the Allergies before we record bonus. If your questions didn't get answered here in this episode, our guest this week went back and answered them all personally, which was just magical of him. Thank you to everyone who tells friends about the show and who subscribes and rates and

of course reviews the show. It matters more than you know, it keeps us up in the charts. And I read them all. And then like a crisp chili pickle, I select a fresh one to save her each week. Such as this week, Natty Daddy Light says, I live and work at a state park, what? With little to no internet access. So every week I drive 30 minutes to the nearest town and very creepily sit outside a coffee shop in my car poaching the Wi-Fi.

The owner and I have an understanding so I can download the latest episode of Allergies and says, firstly and foremostly, Allie Ward has been my father all along. Yes, that's true. And B, there is so much I don't know, but the best way to overcome all of the not knowing is to ask stupid questions. So Natty Daddy Light, my child, and to everyone who left a review, I've read it with my heart. Thank you for letting me internet dad you all with weird facts and advice. Okay, experimental archaeology.

Experiment comes from the root meaning to try or to risk and archaeology comes from the root for ancient things. So experimental archaeology is to risk ancient things, which sounds dicey, but that's not really what it means. So you'll see. Now, thisologist and I have been Twitter friends for a while. He tweeted at me a few years back about wanting to be on the show and fun fact, I almost showed up at his house unannounced like a year ago and just shoved a mic in his face to surprise

him. But I figured that's probably technically illegal. And we have had to reschedule this interview probably five times in the last month just because of traveling to be up here with my folks. I had my own weird ER trip involving an infected spider bite that turned out probably just to be an infected scratch from carrying firewood. We don't need to talk about it. Also my laptop screen shattered this week.

So I have rescheduled this person over and over, but he was so understanding and such a joy. And we just chatted about everything from the first tools to bows and arrows to spear throwers, aka atlattles. And if you don't know what an atlattle is or how to say it, that's fine. That means this is going to eff you up even better. So in the history of allergies, I have never met anyone so passionate about a thing. And it just goes to show you that though this person is an undergrad, his level of knowledge

and engagement in the field makes him likely one of the top experts in the world on this one particular item. It's astounding. Get ready to stand and to learn about early human axes, indigenous populations of North and Central and South America, tales of fieldwork, some new archaeology heroes, tools versus weapons, what to do if you find artifacts on a hike, and the physics of how far you can lob ancient weaponry with member of the board of directors of the World Atlattle Association, which you'll understand and know how to pronounce by the end of this episode.

So I'm very honored to even be on your radar and even more honored to be on this podcast. It has been probably the number one professional goal of mine for two years. Really? I swear to God. I distinctly remember I tweeted, I wish I could just get my PhD tomorrow for the sole purpose of being a guest on allergies. Oh. I'm shooketh.

That's what I am. I'm shooketh. Oh, I'm so excited to have you on because as soon as you told me what you were into, I was like a waddle, waddle. I had no idea. And then I put you on the list like immediately. And can you tell me a little bit like where are you studying right now? What is your research about?

Okay. So right now I am an undergraduate student. I'm going into my senior year. I'm a double major in anthropology and philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Within anthropology, which is especially in American universities, a broad category, the study of humanity basically, there's four subfields. One of those subfields is archaeology. My specialization or my focus within anthropology is archaeology.

And then my focus within philosophy is political theory, but that's completely different. I bounced around a few labs at UNLV. What's great about that university is that they have a designated building for archaeology laboratories. And most people think like, well, why doesn't archaeologists need a laboratory? They're digging in the field. It's not something that most people associate with archaeology is like in lab work. But UNLV invested heavily in, I think there are, I want to say, 12 or 15 separate designated

archaeology laboratories for different fields of archaeology, material specialties, different regional specialties. So one of those labs is an experimental archaeology lab. And I've been working with that lab since I was in high school, actually. My sophomore year of high school, I was talking to my school counselor. And she goes, Angela, what do you want to do with life? And I said, well, you know, since I've been since first or second grade, I have written down that I wanted to be an experimental archaeologist when I grew up.

What? How did you even know those words? Oh, I, it's crazy. I mean, I wanted to be an archaeologist since kindergarten. That was the first, I mean, I fell in love, started with Egyptology, you know, shout out to Mrs. Drake, who's my elementary school librarian who noticed that I really liked a fiction book about Egypt. So she said, well, there's these nonfiction books about Egypt, and I had no clue what

nonfiction was. And there are picture books filled with, you know, pictures of daily life in Egypt, and I just fell in love and I quickly moved on to other cultures and civilizations around the world. But by first or second grade, I knew that ancient tools and weapons were, you know, what I was most interested in and wanted to study the most. But anyway, in high school, I told my counselor, I want to do experimental archaeology. And she goes, well, did you know that one of the students here is the daughter of the

experimental archaeology professor at UNLV? No way. I mean, what are the odds of this happening? You know, there's a, my high school had 3,300 students and it is in the fifth largest school district in the country with, you know, there's like 60 high schools in Las Vegas. And I was at the one with the daughter from the experimental archaeology professor at UNLV. So she put me in contact with her. The professor's name was Dr. Karen Hari.

She specializes in experimental pottery work. However, she has graduate students who are doing experimental, you know, leather tanning work and architectural work and stuff like that. But she's a ceramicist and she specializes in ancestral Puebloan sites in Northern Arizona, in the Shibwitz Plateau area, part of Parishant National Monument in Northern Arizona, kind of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. And I emailed her and I said, I've been obsessed with experimental archaeology and archaeology since I was little, you know, I'll come clean test tubes for you.

I'll do whatever I just want to be in the environment. And she said, well, me and three grad students are going off into the desert for a month this summer. Would you like to come with us? Oh, my God. Of course, my parents were like, Oh, I don't know about that. They eventually said yes after meeting her. And it was myself, Dr. Hari and three of her PhD students, her masters of PhD students.

And we stayed out in a National Park Service cabin out in the Shibwitz Plateau. And then every day we had to get into a pickup truck and barrel over boulders. It would take us maybe in like maybe 45 minutes to drive like three miles because that's how slow we were going. It was we probably could have walked faster where we had so much equipment. We didn't want to do that. Once we would park, we'd then have to hike another like hour and hour and 15 minutes. Now this is in June in Arizona, 115 degrees.

We've got, you know, between 30 and 50 pound packs on us with gear and stuff like that. Oh, I'm a little grimy and sweaty here. But once we got to the site, it was magnificent. I mean, it was the site itself was just kind of you couldn't really tell it was a site unless you knew what you're looking for. Because this was at a time when people, they weren't living in one place necessarily the whole time. They weren't investing a lot into their architecture, kind of the beginnings of the Puebloan culture

in that area that like built those kind of big like Mesa Verde type places. Okay. Quick aside, I was not sure what Mesa Verde type places were, but I looked it up. And in Mesa Verde National Park near the four corners, there's a series of cliff dwellings like Cliff Palace. And that's an almost a thousand year old, gorgeous, complex ancient Puebloan structure built into this jaggy, rocky cliff side. And if you look up pictures of Cliff Palace and don't gasp, you should call a doctor.

So we get to this area and I'm like, Oh, this is interesting because it's not exactly what I was picturing, but they're like, Oh yeah, here's a house here and here's another pit house over here. And I'm like, sure, if you tell me if you say so, because it just looks like pile of rocks to me. At that time, I didn't know what I was looking at, but the site was situated basically at the rim of the Grand Canyon in a place inaccessible unless you were an archaeologist working on the site basically.

So we were able to have our lunch kind of just perched, perched there in the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It was just beautiful. And she's brought out one other like younger student out to that trip and they after the first like two or three days, they're like, you know what, archaeology is not for me. I had the exact opposite reaction. I was completely, you know, fully invested after the first day. And at night at camp, we would do experimental archaeology stuff.

We'd throw out laddles. We'd throw slings. We made our own rope out of yucca, stuff like that. And it was just an incredible experience. Nice. So that kind of led me into working in that experiment archaeology lab. But then the last two years or last year and a half, I moved over to the lab next door, which is the Paleoethnobotany and ancient agriculture lab.

It's run by Dr. Alan Farahani. So Paleoethnobotany just means old cultural plants. So it's any plant remains that were used by humans at some point. So it's mostly seeds. They study kind of the beginnings of agriculture and the domestication of grains in Southwest Asia, specifically in Jordan and then also separately in Armenia as well. So Angelo's lab work right now focuses on stone tools found in the Jordan area and investigating why they were made and used in the period that they date from rather than the more contemporary

materials of the time, like iron and copper. So it's kind of like trying to figure out people who love to listen to vinyl. It's cool. It's intriguing. Or people who have a CD collection. Like is that sad? Why are they doing it? Myself included.

So many questions. And now when you say experimental archaeology, what exactly does that mean? Does that mean how new methods are created, how new tools are created? How do you define that? So experimental archaeology is the process of recreating ancient technology and attempting to use the tools and weapons in order to better understand how ancient peoples would have used them and how that might have impacted their daily life. That's kind of one aspect of it is like the actual recreation of the tools and like, okay,

well, how hard is it to collect wheat using a psych made out of flint or whatever. The other side of experimental archaeology is purposely recreating the tools and then breaking them while using them in order to see what that looks like in an archaeological record. So to give an example, we find, you know, arrowheads or projectile points and an experimental archaeologist will recreate some of those weapons, fire them at, let's say, a pig carcass or a ballistic gelatin or something like that. Wow.

And notice how, you know, okay, well, what happens when you miss, well, if it hits a rock, it breaks this way. If it hits bone, it breaks this way, if it hits wood, it breaks this way. And once you collect enough data points, you can say, okay, well, I know for a fact that this arrowhead broke when it hit a rock because I was the one that broke it by hitting it against a rock. So then you look in the archaeological record to go, okay, well, here are these 2000 year old arrowheads.

Well, if they present similar fracture patterns as the ones that I found by throwing it against a rock or whatever, I know that that's how it was broken by. So another thing an experimental archaeologist might do is build old tools like a sickle and then go harvest a bunch of wheat with it and then look at the sickle microscopically to see how the blade is worn down by the plants or what sheen the plants left on the edge. It's literally called sickle sheen to try to match markings found microscopically on found ancient blades. So like imagine someone finding your kitchen knife thousands of years from now and they're

like bleep, blurp. This person loved to use a dull butter knife to cut cold pizza. Wow, what a queen. She must have been royalty. I wish I could have hung with her and then they just use traces of my DNA to simulate a hologram of me and we'd party. Oh, okay. And now walk me through a little bit of a timeline of materials because you're talking

about Flint. I know that you have to do your own napping of obsidian and things like that. When did humans use different materials where and how do you even wrap your brain around that? Oh, I still can't wrap my brain. I probably will go to my grave not fully understanding how ancient ancient humans figured this out because when napping is possibly the hardest thing I've ever taught myself to do. Napping side note is with a K like kidnapping and it means to chip away at a rock which

is very difficult as opposed to the napping most of us have mastered the last few months. I have taught myself a lot of weird skills over the years both related to archaeology and not related to archaeology and I've never had to put more effort both mentally and physically into understanding Flint napping. And for years I could give you a lecture on the fracture mechanics and the physics and the geometry behind Flint napping. I understood it on a conceptual level, but when I had rock on my hand I was never able to complete an arrowhead.

So it kind of just took just a lot of practice. But generally to go over the timeline, so the oldest stone tools we know about date to about 3.3 million years ago, which was way before the human species even existed. Yeah. What? Yeah. Crazy. Crazy.

Yeah. These were super rudimentary flakes and choppers. They were not sophisticated arrowheads. They were like a rock that had one or two flakes broken off of it to then be used to chop some wood or chop a bone or something like that. Then there's the homo habilis, which is one of the hominid ancestors to homo sapiens and literally means the handyman basically. They date to about 2.3 million years ago and they were the first ones to kind of have cohesive

stone tool technology called Aldewan tools, at least that's what we call them. They were still pretty simple choppers, but they are similar to each other to the point where we can kind of make it a determination that like, okay, this group of hominids all created their stone tools in the same process. So that shows a little bit of standardization and a little bit more complexity to be able to repeat the same thing over and over and over. They stopped being random and it started being planned and that's kind of when we see a little bit of a mental shift in the hominid species and the ability to work out problems

like that. A lot of experimental archaeologists, especially ones that work with stone tools that are millions of years old, kind of point to this complexity as a way to analyze how complex the complexity of the tools as a way to analyze how complex hominid brains were becoming. Then yeah, so it's kind of really cool because it takes so much brain power to understand how to make these stone tools that it kind of shows that they must have had better brain capacity or at least better abstract thinking conceptualization to be able to repeat these processes to make similar looking tools over and over.

Homo erectus is the first hominid species to leave Africa and they do that about two million years ago and they kind of spread all over mostly Asia actually, but they kind of go up Southwest Asia and then East. They make a shulian handaxes. What is an a shulian axe? You want to ask Google? It's okay. I already did that for us.

It's a doozy dispel. A shulian is Très Française. It's named after a site in France where some of these were found. If you're thinking handaxes, you're probably thinking like a cute hatchet, but a handax is actually a rock that's been chipped away at one end to come to a point and helps cut things. It's like a sharp rock. That's what that is.

Okay. These are really kind of standardized. We find a lot of these big handaxes that were all flaked the same way, that all look the same way. At that point, it's apparent that these hominids were teaching each other how to replicate this tool. It was part of the same material culture where this shape of tool and this kind of way of making it was prioritized in some way for some reason.

It was important for everyone in the community to make them the same way. We find a lot of these shulian handaxes made the same way. What's also important about a shulian handax is that it's flaked on both sides. It's one of the first by-face tools. A by-face, if you look at a knife edge, it's beveled on both edges. That's by-face. If it's just like a chisel is flat on one end and then it's beveled on the other end, like a wood chisel, that's called a uniface.

Most choppers were kind of unifacial. They would just have like one striking edge, but these shulian handaxes were specifically flaked on both sides to give it a by-face. By-faces are sharper because they come out at a steeper angle to the edge, so they can be sharper. They can even be a little bit more durable as well, so by-faces takes a lot more skill to make a by-face and to be able to replicate that same shape over and over and over. What type of stone were they making these axes out of?

The earlier Aldewan tools were kind of river pebbles or river cobbles. As we get into by-faces, you need a stone that's going to be more predictable in its flaking pattern, so silicate-based crystalline stones like flint or obsidian or chert are really good for that because they act almost like glass. They have a uniform, homogenous crystalline structure that allows you to be able to predict how the shockwaves will interact with the ridges on the rock to create tools in a better way. If you have a really coarsely grained rock, it's going to break an unpredictable pattern,

and it's not going to lend itself to a good tool. How is this person so young and so knowledgeable, and also we haven't even gotten to add laddles? Okay, already I'm learning so much, anyway. So then around 500,000 years ago, which is still before the Homo sapiens species, in Africa, as the evolutionary lines were branching to what would eventually become Homo sapiens, we find potentially the earliest evidence of halting. Halting is when you take a stone tool and you affix it to some sort of handle or other implement, like a wooden handle or a wooden spear or even like an antler handle.

So we find the first evidence of halting, and the way we know that is because you look at the mastic, which is the glue used on the tool, because obviously the wood is rotten away after 500,000 years, but there's residue of glue on the back of some of these tools that were found in Africa, and that indicates that they may have been glued into a handle of some kind. What is the glue? Where are they getting the glue? They can't get them on Amazon?

Yeah, you can't get them on Amazon for sure. They would make it, it's also called pine pitch, so it's kind of a mixture of tree sap, beeswax, wood ash, and fat that would kind of make this really, this kind of black tar glue. And usually you would glue it into a stick or a handle by carving a notch into the piece of wood or the bone, slotting the biface into that notch, putting the glue around, and then usually you tie it with some sort of cordage, whether it's made out of animal sinew, which is really strong and useful because when it's wet, it's really easy to work with, but when it dries, it actually has its own glue.

It shrinks and hardens like a rock. You're able to tie something really tight and then as it dries, it literally constricts around that piece and hardens rock solid to make it a really, really tough, you know, tough pointer, tough half. So they usually tie it as well, but sometimes they would just glue it. But the Neanderthals came around like 400,000 years ago and they started making smaller, more specialized tools and they had the Mousetarian tool tradition and the Levalois tools, which I'm probably mispronouncing, it's a French term and I'm not great with my French.

Let's ask a computer. Levalois. Levalois tools, okay. So by the by, these are like the Ashulean axes, aka sharpened rocks, but they're more refined and they're smaller, they're more knife-like. They look much closer to arrowheads and stone points. And I guess they're evidence that our hairy ancestors were getting some real skills. So think like going from a flip phone to an iPhone.

It's like, ooh. The cool thing about these is that they're able to get really, really precise, sharp flakes they could repeat over and over. And instead of making these big hand axes, which were kind of unruly, they got better at making by-faces on a smaller scale that would work better in hand tools. And we have the earliest, the earliest spears we've ever found are the Schoeningen spears. Now it's a German word that I'm sure I'm mispronouncing as well. The Schoeningen spears, I can't remember, you might have to look at the pronunciation

on that. The Schoeningen spears. It's not helpful. But the Schoeningen spears, they were a collection of like six to seven foot long wooden sticks, basically, that were excavated with a bunch of horse bones and that are dated to about 380,000 years ago, so still before Homo sapiens. So it's theorized that these spears were used as thrusting weapons, but there's a debate about whether or not they could have been throwing weapons as well.

Spears, by the by, are for overhand chucking and thrusting is like underhand stabby times. So look at us, we're archaeologists now. And the difference between a throwing and a thrusting is that the crux of what an atoladdle is? Yes, I like to use in a mnemonic that atlattles are for throwing and spears are for thrusting. When we're talking archaeology, we're talking weapons study. If it is a spear that's being thrown without the aid of another tool like an atlattle, if it's just being thrown, that's a javelin.

Spear by itself, just the word spear indicates it's a thrusting weapon. If it's being thrown by another tool like an atlattle, then it's called a dart, specifically if it has fletchings, which are the feathers in the back. So Sticky McPoynterson, a spear is used to stab, a javelin is tossed forward, and a dart is tossed forward but has fletchings or those feather-like little wings on the back. And a 2019 University College London study had some collegiate javelin competitors try to throw replicas of those heavy German spears to see, could these even be tossed? How far?

Here's the thing with experimental archaeology research. It tells you whether things could be possible, but doesn't necessarily prove that that's what happened. So the result of their research was, okay, it is possible to throw these spears, but that doesn't mean that Neanderthals were throwing the spears, does that make sense? So they found that even with these collegiate trained javelin throwers that anything beyond 15 meters, they weren't able to hit the target at all. And after 20 meters, the spear wouldn't even land point first, it would kind of fishtail

in the air. And this is for a couple reasons. One, the body mechanics of throwing a spear like a javelin with a flat trajectory aiming for a target isn't really conducive for the human body. Javelin throwers, like Olympic javelin throwers, they're throwing at an extremely high art to throw for distance, and it works okay for that. Even those javelin throwers, if you asked them to try to hit a standing target 20 meters in front of them, they would have a lot of difficulty even reaching the target, even

though they can throw 100 meters when they're throwing for distance. It's just the mechanics of throwing at that flat trajectory versus throwing at an extremely steep trajectory are just completely different. Angelo says it's pretty hard to toss a heavy spear on its own both far and accurately. So how are they getting for me to be? And we know that Neanderthals would use hunting tactics where they would either like drive animals off a cliff or corner animals in like canyons or something like that to where they could be easily accessed with thrusting spears to kind of finish off the animal.

These spears are the oldest complete weapons that we have ever found and they date to about 380,000 years ago. I can't even fathom that. It's crazy. It's crazy how that's a time scale that's hard to process because if you think about the entire history of the entirety of recorded human history, so, you know, history that we have like written accounts of by people who developed written language really only go back, you know, a couple thousand years in the grand scheme of humanity.

But we're talking almost 400,000 years old. And like I said, these spears were found in Germany, they were used by Neanderthals at that time. And that's another thing with archaeology. Just because you have excavated the oldest example of something doesn't mean that's when that thing started. Right. That's just the oldest one we've found.

Okay. So for hundreds of thousands of years, these bad boys were too heavy to hurl very far. But as time marched on, weapons got faster and lighter. And about 45,000 years ago, anthropologists think that spears emerged with a little extra help, which is a spear thrower you use in conjunction with it. So it works to fling the shafted weapon a lot like the dog toy, the chucket, which hurls spitty tennis balls at the dog park. In fact, Angelo says that the chucket is a modern atladdle.

What is it called? An atladdle? Attle-laddle? It's an atladdle, not an atladdle. It's an atladdle. Atladdle. Well, I say atladdle. The reason I don't say atladdle is because in my mind, you're pronouncing the middle

L twice, atladdle, what is actually just spelled A-T-L, A-T-L. Now, the word atladdle is a Nahuatl word, which is the language spoken by the group of people in central Mexico that we now call the Aztecs, even though that's not what they call themselves. The Nahuatl people were a collection of people from northern Mexico about 2,000 years ago who slowly tribe by tribe immigrated south towards the valley of Mexico, where other civilizations like Teotihuacan had been flourishing in that time period. Now, one of the first groups to come down was the Toltec group. So they were a Nahuatl-speaking group that came after the fall of Teotihuacan and kind

of established a small kingdom or empire in a city called Tula in central Mexico. And one of the last Nahuatl-speaking tribes to immigrate from northern Mexico to central Mexico was the Mexica tribe. They came in and probably were using bows and arrows at the time, but atladdles were really popular in that central Mexican valley. So they adopted the use of an atladdle. They started conquering these other city-states at the time, and they created a triple alliance between two other city-states.

So it was the Mexica tribe and their city-state of Tenochtitlan, and then two other tribes with two other city-states, their own city-states. They created the Aztec triple alliance. So that's who we, when we say Aztec, we're actually referring to this triple alliance between these three cities, the main group of which was the Mexica tribe in the city of Tenochtitlan, which is what we now call Mexico City. And how long ago was this? So that was in the 13 and 1400s CE, so not too long ago.

Then the Spaniards came, conquered the Aztec, and then enslaved and killed them all with smallpox, one of the worst genocides in history. The Mexica themselves actually had, it was part of their culture to not call themselves the Aztec. The word Aztec means somebody from Aztlan. Aztlan is what they call their northern Mexico homeland. So they were the people from Aztlan. The Spaniards were like, oh, we'll just call you Aztec.

But they called themselves the Mexica, and that's M-E-X-I-C-A, which is where we get the word Mexico or Mexico from. So it all comes from that. So folks in these regions for years and years and years have been amazing hunters. And why? A tool called an atlatal. So in the original Nahuatl pronunciation, atlatal would probably sound something like atl, atl. That D-L is called a voiceless lateral fricative in linguistics, which means that the sound

is not made from your vocal cords. So if you made the T-L sound, your vocal cords wouldn't vibrate. You can put your finger to your vocal cord and you kind of see what sounds make a vibration or what sounds don't. So a sound like a T or like an S doesn't vibrate your vocal cords. But something like an M definitely does vibrate your vocal cords. So that's the difference between voiceless and not voiceless. Lateral means that the air causing the sound is moving sideways around your tongue instead

of coming straight out. It's coming out sideways in the back of your tongue, kind of around your tongue. And then fricative means that the air is kind of turbulent inside your mouth to make the noise. So it's this very strange sound. I don't know how well it's coming up on the mic. Yeah, yeah, I can hear it. So the T-L, it's the hallmark of the Nahuatl language.

You can see T-L in all sorts of Nahuatl words, like that salamander, the axolotl. P.S., personal side note, once I got called out of second grade class by this nice lady who asked me to answer a few really stupid questions like what goes on a pizza, cheese, okay, what travels down the railroad, easy, it's your train. Then for several months I had to report to a trailer near the playground to relearn these fricative lateral lisp. And yes, I know that we need a speech pathology episode, ASAP, I know I'm on it. Anyway, I feel better about my CHs now that I know that they're kind of like a sexy flourish

in other languages. Also buckle the fric up for a tale that is like drunk history, only minus the hot tubs and barfing. Whew, damn, this is a journey. I love it. Boy, howdy. I want to give credit to one of my idols in the archaeology world, Celia Natal. She is one of the most badass archaeologists of all time.

I think she's amazing. She was a Mexican-Irish-American born in San Francisco to a Mexican-American mom and an Irish dad. She went to school in Europe, met an anthropology student. I think he was like a, I think he was Dutch, a Dutch anthropology student. He would read his textbooks at night, taught herself anthropology. As a family trip, they went to Mexico. She was so knowledgeable, especially about Mexican archaeology because of her mom who

taught her some Nahuatl. She was able to do some of these early translations and have a better understanding of the linguistic history of the Mexica people in Mexico. She became one of the first, if not the first honorary professor at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. That was in 1884. It's like way before any college was admitting women. She was the pioneer.

She did so well with her post at the National Museum of Anthropology that in 1886, she got hired by the Harvard University Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology as a contributor for Mesoamerican Archaeology. While she was working with them, she moved to Europe again, where she spent like 10 years in archives in libraries, and she found previously lost Aztec and Zapotec codices or manuscripts or books that were shipped by the Spaniards back to Europe, thrown into a crate in the bottom of the library and forgotten about for 500 years. Oh my God.

And she found two of them. There are only like a handful of these at all for any of the Mesoamerican cultures and like a large proportion of them were found by her alone. So while she was studying all of these manuscripts in Europe, the godfather of cultural anthropology, Edward Burnett Tyler, he wrote this book called Primitive Culture. It established cultural anthropology. Now it definitely was not great because it assumed that Western culture was the pinnacle of human society and everyone else was behind to some degree, which obviously is something

that modern anthropologist archaeologists completely reject as a model for human civilization. But he has this quote, the Aztec civilization is the highest known to have used the spear thrower in reality, a weapon of savagery. And we do not hear of the atlatal being in practical use at the conquest when it had apparently fallen out of disuse and quote, spear throwers remember our atlattles. So what this crusty old man was doing was shit talking atlattles and the people who used them like, how dare now Celia and tall was like, excuse me. So she read that quote.

And he's basically saying because the Aztecs used the atlatal, they were like stupid savages because the rest of the world moved on to the bone arrow, and they were the only ones left in the world using the atlatal, which isn't true, but you know, at the time that's what he thought. So she said, you know what, I'm going to write the first book all about atlattles and I went to prove him wrong. So in the opening paragraph, she calls him out directly and says, like, this will be a response to anybody who thinks that the Mexican people are stupid because we use atlattles.

I'm going to show you how awesome they are. Oh, my God, this crazy amazing book in 1891. And it's basically the first ever academic study on the atlattles and she looks at it not from like an experimental archaeology perspective. So she didn't make an atlattle. She's never thrown in atlattle, but she looked at artistic depictions in those books that she found in other books that were published, literary descriptions and archaeological examples that were found.

And she realized that atlattles were actually really well adapted for aquatic hunting. And she connected the word atlattle to fishermen. So fishermen is atlacatl, which literally means watermen and tlacá means to aim or throw. So if you put those together, it's atlacatl, which is literally water thrower. So that was her theory for where the word atlattle comes from is because it was used as a fishing weapon. It has this name associated with water. And she also found descriptions of Nahuatl people and people in the Aztec religion explained

that in their tradition, there was a demigod named Apocli who invented the atlattle for fishing and taught it to the Mexica people. So Angelo says that according to indigenous culture, this weapon was considered to be handed down directly by the Mexica's god of war for some deity-approved ass-kicking and that no other weapon in the Aztec armory is described with as much reverence as the atlattle. It's thought that only the upper tier of the military and noblemen and generals and the elite, essentially royalty, were even allowed to use atlattles.

And they let the commoners use the peasant weapon, which was the bow and arrow. Oh, it's petty and I love it. Also history, y'all, it's just gossip that matters. And all it takes is someone who is willing to dish, now specifically about zeal and atal. The story gets crazier. I think someone should make a movie about her and they should console me hint hint wink wink.

So so I just wanted to throw this out because I think it's it's important to highlight, especially like women of color in archaeology, especially this this long ago. And so few people know about her, even archaeology students that I just can't pass an opportunity to tell her full story after she wrote this thing about the atlattle, which became very popular because it made so much sense and she published a lot of pictures about it. She moved back to Mexico and she ran an excavation at the isla de sacrifios or the island of sacrifices. A male colleague tried to steal credit from her from her for the excavation, of course.

So she quit her post with the National Museum of Anthropology, published all of her notes and findings in an academic journal, which were so detailed. It was so painfully obvious that she was the actual person who had figured out the site and excavated it. The other guy was fired and disgraced. No. She was like, oh, you're not going to respect me and I'm just going to I'm just going to quit and then disgrace you in an academic journal and show that you are a hack.

And she did it. Oh, my God. So then she got the attention of Phoebe Hearst, who was the mother of William Randolph Hearst, who runs the newspaper in New York, you know, one of the richest, richest people in that time period. Yeah. She becomes Zeeland Natal's patron, buying a house for her in Mexico City and funding all of her studies and excavations with the agreement that some of the material that Zeeland

Natal would excavate would go back to the newly formed Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at UC Berkeley. So it all comes like full circle back to San Francisco, where Zeeland Natal was born. She ends up advocating for indigenous rights in Mexico until she dies. And she convinces Mexico City to recognize March 12 as as tech new year, indigenous new year, where it is still celebrated to this day by the Nahua people who still live in central and northern Mexico to this day. There's I think there's like 1.2 million Nahua speakers still in Mexico, and she got

it formally recognized by the government and it was celebrated in Mexico City, the former site of Tenochtitlan on March 12, 1928 for the first time since 1520, when the conquest happened. Oh, I'm going to cry. I'm going to cry. And to this to this day, Mexico is known out of all the Mesoamerican countries as a country that protects from a government perspective, their archaeological sites really strictly, they're really good about protecting the sites and doing good research and having tourism.

But a lot of people credit her specifically for that because at the time in the 1920s in Mexico, there was a big push to ignore indigenous rights, but specifically ignore indigenous history of Mexico in favor of the Spanish history. So a lot of people were rejecting that they were, you know, had any roots to indigenous Mexico at this time, because a lot of people in Mexico thought that the key to their acceptance on the global stage as Mexico kind of has independence is becoming, you know, a country in a globalized world in the 1920s, that they felt that they would get further with Western countries if they rejected the indigenous background and just were like, yeah, we're

spending a European like you guys where we can play in the global stage, because if you mean who do they have to look at examples to the United States, which also ignored indigenous rights and culture and other places around the world that have done terrible things to indigenous people. So they were just following the lead of the world's superpowers at the time. And she said, no, we should embrace our indigenous heritage. We should uplift indigenous voices. We should sell, you know, let indigenous people celebrate the holidays and recognize those holidays because that's what makes us unique. And if anyone tells you that laddles are what make indigenous Mexicans stupid, just refer them to me because I want to set them straight.

She's badass. She's my hero. I'm Mexican-American. As a Mexican-American archaeology student, she is like just such an idol to me. Plus, she's the first person to study at laddles. She's like, she's my hero. Okay, I'm going to cry. Are you going to cry? Because I'm going to cry. Also, by the way, if anyone needs to honor a badass with a great name for, say, their daughter, may I suggest Celia? I mean, come on. Also, let's finally talk details about this tool. Or is it a weapon? Okay, I look this up. All weapons are tools, but not all tools are weapons. So in this case, an atlattle is a tool of attack or defense, i.e., its weapon. Also, now that we have the rich, drippy backstory, what is this thing?

In terms of what is an atlattle, okay. An atlattle is actually a, okay, it is a stick with a handle on one end and a hook on the other end that engages with the rear end of a dart, which is a long, thin, flexible, wooden spear type thing that has a little dimple at the end behind the feathers. The spur of the atlattle or the hook engages with that knock and it propels the dart further and harder than you could throwing it by hand. So the atlattle refers to just the throwing stick part itself. The dart is the separate implement. So it's the atlattle and dart. Colloquially, we just call the entire system an atlattle. The cool thing about atlattles is that they were used all over the world. And if we kind

of go back to the earlier question of like the progression of human technology, the earliest atlattles we have date to about 20,000 years ago. In fact, it's 17,500 years is like the radiocarbon date that was found in France. It was an atlattle made out of antler. And that's kind of after Neanderthals, that was all Homo sapiens. Now, the thing is that atlattle use is theorized to go back as far as 45,000 BCE. Wow. So quite a long time before that. And the way we know this is because when you throw atlattles, it puts a lot of strain on your elbow and you develop an arthritis condition that bioarchaeologists call atlattle elbow. Oh my God. So there is actually a skeleton from Australia that dates to 42,000 years ago called the mongo man.

Mongo man, side note, is also referred to as LM3 and was found laid out in a somewhat extravagant ceremonial burial. And he was thought to have been about 50 years old, which is like middle-aged for us now, but heck of old for back then. And he stood around six foot five, which is unusually tall. So what else is interesting about this amazing man's remains? And he has extreme atlattle elbow in his right elbow. And it's theorized that that's because he was throwing an atlattle. And that puts the atlattle to be about 45,000 BCE. Wow. The atlattle is the first two part weapon system, potentially two part tool system as well, kind of complex tool system ever invented by hominids. So a and to break that down, a compound tool is something that has two

or more materials. So remember when I talked earlier about the halting, where you take the stone and you glue it onto the stick. So that's a compound tool. But then a complex tool is a tool that uses two separate implements that are not like permanently attached. So a bow and arrow or an atlattle and dart, those are complex tools. Okay. So the atlattle is or the, you know, the spear throw or the atlattle is the oldest, potentially the oldest complex two part weapon or tool system ever invented. It's also the potentially the first weapon or tool system that was unique to the homo sapien species, because Neanderthals were using thrusting spears and potentially throwing spears. And the bow and arrow wouldn't be really invented for like another

20,000 30,000 years. So this was what kind of homo sapien human species brought to the stage. Angelo said also that using tools allowed us to access more nutrition while expending fewer calories and hunting with an atlattle uses way fewer calories than like chasing a deer for 10 miles until it's just like fine. Now those extra calories and possibly the fatty stuff from brains and bone marrow have enabled our ancestors to grow bigger brains, which allowed us to invent weapons and reality TV and finally global warming and nuclear existential risk, but also puppy calendars and coffee creamer, which is good. But potentially it's the homo sapien's ability to develop these complex tools that allowed them to kind of outlast and survive.

And the atlattle is the first indication of this. So it is this really old universal weapon. Everybody in humanity is connected by the use of atlattles because it was used by everybody. And we have found atlattle remains or atlattle evidence on every continent except for Africa and Antarctica. Now, again, that doesn't mean that they weren't used in Africa. It just means we haven't found evidence of their use in Africa. But we have lots of evidence of the use in Asia and Europe and Australia and North America and South America. And do you think that they developed all from the kind of same source or do you think a lot of people on different continents thought, hey, what if I put a doohickey on the end of this sticky stick and then I'm able to kill more

stuff more efficiently from farther away? That's the big question. That's really hard to tell. I'm not sure. There's no clear answer. It does seem like the use in North and South America is associated with a human migration across the Beringland Bridge around 15,000 BCE. So it seems like atlattle use wasn't developed independently in North and South America, but it was brought by the people who migrated over the Beringland Bridge. In terms of the rest of Europe and Asia and Australia, I am not sure. And I don't think that's really been answered is how it spread. And let's say it was started in one area and then spread to other areas. There's two ways that could have happened. Either the people who developed it, taught it to other people,

and then those people took it to their areas and taught it to other people. Or the original group who developed the atlattle broke off and they migrated to other areas, bringing atlattle use with them. So there's a difference between teaching and migrating. We're not entirely sure how it spread. And that kind of goes for the Bonero as well, which most estimates put the Bonero as being invented around 15,000 BCE. So that's a full 20,000 years after the atlattle was invented. Yeah, that's surprising to me that there's such a gap. Such a huge gap. Now, there is conflicting evidence that bows and arrows go back to 40,000 BCE as well. But that's fairly inconclusive evidence.

So that's kind of a little bit questionable as well. We're not entirely sure. But it seems like bows came significantly after atlattles. Now, the thing about atlattles is that it's not just a stick that throws another stick. There's a lot of engineering that goes into it. So because you're extending your arm by having this handle, you're increasing your leverage, and you're also increasing your angular momentum at the tip of the tool. Y'all have been asking me for a physics episode. So here you go. And that transfers a lot more energy into the dart. The other thing is that you're propelling the dart from behind the center of gravity, as opposed to throwing a javelin where you're holding

the javelin at the center of gravity. That means that you're able to, with the atlattle, you're able to put more energy into the entire dart system, which propels it further. So there's something about propelling something from behind the center of gravity that works a lot better. If you think about a bow and arrow, the bowstring engages the rear of the arrow, propelling it from behind, just like an atlattle. Also, the most important, and this is the number one thing that people get wrong when they try to make an atlattle, or they try to understand atlattles. This is the flimflam? The most important part of the atlattle and dart system is the flexibility of the dart. Really? So it's got to go boyoyoyoing?

It's got to go boyoyoyoing. And if you look at slow motion video, not even slow motion, if you just look at in person, you know, real real speed video, because the darts are so long, you can see the flex happen in real time. We're talking six to eight inches of flex while it's flying, which is a lot. I've seen footage and it really wobbles and you're like, shit, is that okay? And it is by design. And without the flex, if you try to throw up a stiff spear with an atlattle, the spear would fishtail in the air because all the energy going into the rear of the dart needs to go somewhere and the tip of the dart kind of resists motion because of Newton's laws. So all that energy needs to go somewhere and eventually the tip starts raising

and what happens is you flick the rear of the dart underneath the spear, which causes it to fishtail in the air. And atlattle dart, on the other hand, flexes while you're throwing. So right as you're about to throw the dart flexes, storing the energy, keeping the point straight on target. And then that flex releases as you finish flicking the atlattle, which causes it to flex in the air, but stay on target the whole way. Atlattle darts are thicker in the front than they are in the rear, which means there's a taper, a very smooth taper, usually from about half inch at the tip, half inch in diameter to the tip, to three eighths inch diameter at the feathers, at the fletchings. There's more flex happening on the feather end than there is at the tip end,

which means the tip stays on target. And the rest of the dart flexes around the tip. Oh my gosh, that is so much physics. Yeah, it's so much physics. And you can imagine if the dart is an even diameter across the whole thing, as you know, if there's not a taper, that means that the majority of the flex is going to be at the middle of the dart, it's going to flex up and down. But that means that both the tip and the feathers are going to flex six to eight inches around the target, which that could be the difference between a hit and a miss if you're trying to hunt. And then what is the arrow point? Like what are the what types of materials are at the tip? So definitely to get to this specialized, you need to use one of those

good stones that I talked about earlier. So flint, chert, or obsidian, that's basically it. Obsidian, he told me, can get sharp. But how thin is this razor's edge? Obsidian does get to a sharpness level on a molecular level that's unknown to any other technology that humans have created. It's it's like 10 times sharper than surgical steel, which is crazy to even think about. Yeah, the problem is obsidian is very brittle. So it's good for it's very sharp, but it breaks very quickly. Flint and chert are not as sharp, but they're much more durable. So there's a trade off between the two. And when you're using an obsidian point on an on a tool like an arrow or a spearhead or an atlatal point, that tool isn't necessarily that molecular sharp. Because you

would purposely effectively dull the edge to make it more durable. Okay, it's still very sharp. But but it's not that like molecular level sharp. They would use molecular level sharpness obsidian tools for other purposes, but not necessarily for projectile points, because they they're too weak. Okay, those tools, it's process called flint napping. And it's the process of making small chips or flakes out of a crystalline silica rock like flint, chert or obsidian in order to make tools in a specific shape or pattern. Personally, with flint napping, I always have issue. I can either get the tool really sharp, or I can get the tool in the right shape. But it's really hard to get it both sharp and in the right shape. So that's kind of what I'm working on right now. I practice

flint napping a lot. But that's generally what the tips would be made out of out of out of those three materials. And even sometimes like one group would use, you know, two or three different types of materials to make their points depending on what they had access to. Oh, I think it's important to note that, you know, atlattles were called different things with different people. So specifically in Australia, they called them Womras. Instead of being like a six, five or six foot atlatal dart, they would use seven or nine foot atlatal darts, they're really, really long and heavy. And they would use really long Womras, which is what they call their atlattles. And the cool thing about Australian Womras is that they're like a Swiss army knife, they would actually attach with glue,

a knife, like a obsidian or a flint knife into the handle to use like as a knife. The atlatal itself is very differently shaped. Instead of being a stick, it's more of like this cup or bowl shape that's really, really big and rounded. So they could use that to collect berries, they would paint maps on the inside of their Womras, and they would even put notches in the Womras to make friction fires. So with one Womra and one atlatal or one dart, you're basically set to go to survive the Australian outback. It had everything you needed. Oh my gosh, that is so genius. 10 out of 10 would buy on impulse at RAI. So genius. Atlattles are pretty terrifying. Because you're thinking like, okay, well,

hand-thrown spear compared to a bone arrow, what's the damage difference here? Well, a bone arrow, an arrow is lighter and it travels faster. An atlatal dart is heavier, still travels fast, but doesn't travel as fast. So there's a trade-off. But the impact force of an atlatal dart is big enough to take down a woolly mammoth, because that's what they were used for on North America specifically. The Clovis people, where the Clovis culture was in Canada and in Northeastern United States about 13,000 years ago, and they used atlattles to hunt mammoth. Modern tests with atlattles have found that they can reach speeds, atlatal darts can reach speeds around 80 miles per hour. And the world record, yeah, crazy fast. The world record for an atlatal

throw in terms of distance is 260 meters, which is 850 feet. So we're talking almost three full football fields. Oh my gosh. But modern atlatal users, part of the World Atlatal Association, which I'm on the board of directors of, we host competitions and there are people who can nail a six to eight inch target at 20 meters, which is, you know, it's almost 70 feet with like 95% accuracy. Unbelievable. How much practice does that take? As someone who throws atlattles, pardon, how much practice does that take to get that kind of precision? I've been throwing atlattles for almost, I'm trying to think, I've been throwing atlattles for like seven or eight years, but I've been studying atlattles for 10 or 11 years. And I'm

still not at that accuracy level. I'm decent. When I competed in the youth division, I did pretty well. But now that I'm in the adult division, I do pretty terribly. But some of these guys have been throwing for 20, 30, 40 years. And they are, they're like, they're like ancient snipers. It's pretty incredible. They will literally nail the smallest of targets from impossible distances. Most people with a bone arrow aren't able to have that level of accuracy. Spaniards wrote that atlatal darts could go through chainmail. And modern tests have proven that atlatal darts will go through chainmail. So even even these European conquistadors who had never seen an atlatal before, because Europe stopped using atlatal like 15,000 years prior, they're seeing tens of

thousands of a Mexica and Aztec soldiers throwing a rain cloud of darts that are flying at 80 miles an hour with giant obsidian razor sharp broadheads on them coming from 100 to 200 feet away. It's terrifying. They are terrified of the atlatal more than almost any other weapon because they had, I mean, even their archers weren't that powerful. So that I think that's like really interesting that they just wrote about how terrified they were about laddles. And I would be terrified as well if I was on a receiving end. Yeah, one of these things. Why do you think any type of culture stopped using them? Okay, great question. I totally forgot to bring that up. But yeah, a couple things. So

laddles were developed during the Pleistocene, which is the Ice Age. And they were like I mentioned, they were really used to hunt big Ice Age megafauna. So like giant ground sloths, woolly mammoths, stuff like that. Also, during the Pleistocene, because it was so cold, a lot of the world, especially a lot of the Northern Hemisphere was like more of a tundra than it was a forest. So the atlatal kind of works well in this open environment. Because the sweet, the throwing motion is what I like to call visually loud. It's not, you know, it doesn't make a noise, but it's a big motion. Whereas with a bone arrow, you can the motion to release an arrow is just releasing your fingers, and it makes almost no movement at all. So as the Ice Age

ended, animals got smaller and more skittish like deer. And humans were hunting in more densely wooded areas, which makes swinging a big atlatal really difficult. And also the throwing the swinging motion of the atlatal potentially could scare the deer before the atlatal can reach it. Right. That kind of begs the question, okay, well, then why did atlatal use stay in North and South America as long as it did? Like for the Aztecs, it might be because of that religious reason, they just, they stuck with it because they felt that a strong religious connection to it. But other areas, you know, didn't really develop the bone arrow until a lot later, and they were still using a specifically in the American Southwest, which is where I am,

we're using atlattles, you know, up until well up until about like 50 BCE, kind of when the bow starts being developed, maybe a little bit earlier than that. But atlattles dominated in these desert environments, because they were a little bit more open, kind of like how the tundra was open, and they would use them to hunt big horn sheep. Right where I, near where I live in Las Vegas is a place called Valley of Fire State Park, and there's a place called atlatal rock. And it's called atlatal rock because at the top of the cliff, there are pictographs and petroglyphs, I'm sorry, petroglyphs of atlattles that are about like 2000 year old petroglyphs. And the cool thing is that the

atlattles are so perfect, it's almost like they held up an atlatal and traced it into the rock. Like they even show the darts with the feathers and everything. So this might even be up to 4000 years old. And I looked up photos and in this red rocked southern Nevada landscape, up a steep winding steel staircase to the top of a deep ochre desert boulder formation is what looks to be graffiti etched in rock. But it's this beautiful line art of antelopes and targets and a long dart and boom, an atlatal with two little finger holes. More on that in a minute. Also, some absolute dick hole with the initials BBC added to this art, and I hope they burn their tongue on hot soup. I'm just, I'm sorry, I'm really mad. Also,

at this point in making the episode, I wanted to just bail and blast Bon Jovi through the warm August air until I arrived in this desert in the valley of Nevada fire to stare at this rock, which is just proof positive that anologist can make you fall in love with an obscure tool that you just never knew existed. Now, in the Southwest and into Mexico, atlattles had some special features. They actually switched up the grip. Instead of holding the atlatal like a hammer, they would create these finger holes to put their fingers through and kind of hold it with this upturned hand. Turns out that reduces the elbow strain that causes. Because if you can imagine if you got if you got atlatal elbow and you can't hunt anymore,

yeah, that's it. That's game over. Yeah. So they develop different throwing style in order to prevent that atlatal elbow. They also developed compound darts that had detachable foreshaves. So the idea behind these were you have like a five foot main shaft with the feathers. And then you have like a one foot foreshad that actually has the obsidian point in it. The foreshad goes into the main shaft. You throw that at a bighorn sheep. When it hits the bighorn sheep, the hope is that the main shaft pops out leaving the foreshad in because if the bighorn sheep ran with that big six long shaft still attached, it would hit a tree and break and then there goes all your hard work. Oh man. Yeah. That allowed humans to go collect the

main shaft, put on a new point and throw it again. So hunters only needed to carry one or two main shafts and then carry a small pouch of like five or six foreshaves. Was it genius? Absolutely genius. That is genius. So think of a fancy quill pen with a bunch of different nibs. Also some anthropologists postulate that this was the first ever complex use of the phrase, just the tip. That's not true. Yeah. And we call that a basket maker style at Ladle. It was very, very common about 1500 BCE in central and southern Nevada, northern Arizona, southern Colorado and kind of that four corners area. The basket maker people would eventually become the ancestral Puebloan people who eventually became what we now know as like the Hopi and the Zuni Pueblo Indigenous people of the four corners

area. So it has this rich, long history in this area and this basket maker style actually shows up all over the Southwest and because of the aridity of the desert here, we find more intact at Ladle's in the American Southwest than we do anywhere else in the world. In fact, the most intact at Ladle ever found is the Broken Roof Cave at Ladle. It was found in the 1920s or 30s in Arizona. P.S. I look this up and it's right near the Utah border and it's got this kiki name because rocks just literally would rain down on researchers as they excavated things like burial sites and human remains, but also an at Ladle with some darts. And despite being thousands of years old, it's beautifully preserved. It's made out of oak with hide finger loops and a nice dainty little

curve to it. And you can find pictures of it online, Broken Roof Cave at Ladle. It is absolutely gorgeous. It still has the leather finger loops intact. It has all the weights intact, the spur and carved beautifully. It's incredible. And we just find artifacts like that in the Southwest because it's so dry, things preserve a lot longer. And the cool thing is that that throwing style with the finger loops and stuff, we find as far south as the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Whether it was spread by people or whether it was developed independently, either way, the longest users of at Ladle's developed this this throwing style that prevented that at Ladle elbow. And the last thing I want to mention before we get to Patreon questions,

I know I'm so sorry. No, obsession is contagious. So lay it on me. I'm ready. This is a crazy thing. It was an experimental archaeology project that I got to be a part of involving at Ladle's. And it involves the Molcha civilization of Peru. So the Molcha civilization were around between like 100 and 700 CE before the Incan Empire, like well before the Incan Empire. And they used at Ladle's a lot. And there's this guy Christopher Donnan, he's an archaeology professor at UCLA. And he has been the expert on the Molcha civilization for like 30 years, like he studied it more than anyone else. And he found a bunch of these pots that have paintings on the pot of people throwing at Ladle's at some aerial target. And he didn't really understand

what it was. And the at Ladle's look weird, they have these weird wooden cross pegs, didn't understand it. So he took it to the World At Ladle Association. And he said, hey, what do you guys think this is? And we spent the next year redeveloping the Molcha toss game. And it basically what it is, is there's a giant turkey feather shuttlecock that's attached throughout Ladle dart. Oh my God, throw that into the air. And it flies like 50, you know, 50 feet in the air. And because it's a big turkey feather shuttlecock, it kind of floats in the air. Everyone else have that ladle darts that have these wooden cross pegs on it, that we throw at the shuttlecock as it's falling. And the cross pegs engage with a string that's on

the shuttlecock, tangles the string and pulls it down. So it's like, it's like 2000 year old trap shooting with that ladle's. Oh my gosh, how do you make sure you don't bone each other in the face with that? Oh, yeah, we will we have all these safety protocols, everyone lines up and throws in the same direction. So there's no downrange. But if you look up Molcha toss on YouTube, there's actually a video of the world association do doing the multitask experiment side by side with the paintings from the multi civilization. It's a really cool video because it's like experimental archaeology in action. We have this picture of this ritual, we don't understand. Well, let's try to figure it out. And we try to figure it out. And it seems to have

worked. Okay, I looked up video of this and it involves one at ladle dart with a bouquet of stripy brown feathers on the end and a long string wound around the shaft. And then once it's launched a row of like 10 other at ladle darts go boy, after it to see who can snag the string and how bananas that this was all the rage and then was just buried under millennia, waiting to be reenacted. And now the multitask is a ladle competition that's part of almost every at ladle tournament. Every major at ladle tournament as one of the four main events of at ladle tournaments when the WA hosts host them. Oh my god, it's like it's like the closest scene to having a time machine pretty much. Yeah, basically, I mean, it felt so cool to be able to

be part of this process of figuring out how this worked out. And again, I didn't even when I was doing the experiment, I didn't really fully appreciate it until I saw the video after and it had those side by side comparisons. And it was like, oh my gosh, we nailed it. We totally nailed it. Nailed it. Okay, so now it's time for Angelo, your favorite experimental archaeologist to nail a few patreon questions that you all threw and rusted at him. But before we get to them, a word from word approved sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate to a cause of the archaeologists choosing. And this week, it's an incredible mutual aid fund called the black trial, which is a collective of archaeologists from PhD students to faculty members committed to

the active support of archaeology students from working class and historically looted communities who require economic support. So black trial provides hookups to mentors and journal articles, as well as micro grants from five bucks to 300 bucks. No questions asked to archaeology graduate and undergraduate students who need it with students of color and those without parental or family support or who lack access to other forms of financial aid by virtue of being undocumented to the front, they say. So I dig them very much and Angelo is an angel for letting us know about them. So for more on this, check the link in the show notes or you can go to blacktraulcollective.wordpress.com and that was made possible by sponsors of the show who you may hear about now.

Okay, let's get to a few Patreon questions in this whirlwind exploration of ancient tools. First question, this was asked by Riley McKinnis, Joshua Reed, Brittany Panos and Sarah Koolig. Essentially, one want to know, they need to know, do you play Dungeons and Dragons? And what class would an atletal play as? And what would be its cost in gold pieces? Do you play D&D? Yay or nay? I don't play D, I don't play D&D. However, I stalked Patreon questions that had a time and I prepared an answer for this question because I knew it's the only one I wouldn't be able to answer off the top. Oh my gosh, I picked it first. I'm such a dick. I don't, I don't know. I don't know all the classes and stuff, but I will give what I think the stats for an atletal

would be in comparison to a sphere of javelin in a bow because there are scientific studies comparing the four weapons. If we refer to a 1986 study by Anand Raymond about the effect of atletal weights and force comparisons between bows and atletals and spears and javelins, he found that the range for an atletal would be in between a hand-thrown spear slash javelin and a bow. He also found that atletal darts are slower than bows and arrows, but have doubled the kinetic energy of self bows and long bows. Oh, okay. So bows aren't better across the board, but they're faster or powerless body movement, so they wouldn't scare prey as much. So basically, whatever, you know, I'm sure bows and javelins are used in D&D, I'm not sure, but if they are,

you're going to look for something that has the range between a javelin and a bow, but double the impact force and damage potential of a bow and arrow. Nice. Okay. D&Ders now have an answer for that. Perfect. How many gold pieces? Let's just say five. I don't play D&D. Five. Five. Okay. Jen Woods, first-time question asker, asks, if I wanted to make one of these, how would I go about it? And is that a good idea or a terrible one? And side note, Jen has done throwing knives and axes and archery, so maybe those skills would overlap. And then Fiddy Pong wants to know if I was marooned on an island that had game animals and trees, how reasonable would it be for me to attempt to

fashion myself an atladdle and hunt with it before starving to death? Great questions. Atladdles are way easier to make than bows and arrows. Okay. If I was stranded on an island, I would make myself an atladdle. Bows, you have to make bow string, you have to find the right wood, you have to shape the wood correctly. There's so much, bows are way more complicated. And if you're in a survival situation, you don't have the time to make a bow. Atladdles are a lot easier to make. Now, it doesn't mean atladdles are easy to make, they're just drastically easier to make and more reliable to make, you know what I mean, in that situation. So making an atladdle, great idea, regardless of survival situation. Everyone

should make an atladdle, it's a lot of fun. They're pretty easy to make, especially if you're not going to do like a traditional method or make it out of stone tools, just buy stuff at Home Depot, no big deal. The atladdle itself is the easy part. You can, you know, effectively just a wooden two by four that you can hold comfortably with a nail in it or some sort of wooden peg as the hook. That's all you need for the atladdle. The dart is the hard part. You need to have a dart that's flexible enough. When I made my first atladdle, I was maybe like 11 years old or something like that, 11 or 12. So I was a lot smaller. And what I would use was four foot wooden dowels that were quarter inch diameter, I would make my own duct tape fletchings for the feathers. And I would

tie a bunch of duct tape to the tip to make it front heavy to give it enough weight because I wasn't going to put an actual like metal tip on there. My parents were crazy enough to let an 11 year old make ancient weapons in the garage for not crazy enough for me to actually, to let me actually put real tips on them, which is good on their part, to be honest. So yeah, so I, that's what I did. And those quarter inch dowels are definitely like flexible enough. They would work pretty well. If you're going to make them just sound like out of a stick, the, you're going to want to dry the stick out, peel away all the bark, heat the stick over a fire. When you heat something wood over a fire, you can actually bend it. It's

really pliable. You'd be surprised how pliable wood is when it gets hot. And so that's how you would straighten it in both ancient times. And now you straighten with the same way. So you heat your stick over a dowel and just press, you know, slowly press and bend it against the whatever bender, you know, bend it has in it, straighten it out. And you just want to make sure that it's thin and flexible. Now there's kind of a hack. It doesn't have to be as thin as if it's really long. For example, if I have like a quarter inch steel bar, yeah, that's not going to be flexible. But if that quarter of steel bar was a mile long, it's definitely going to be flexible. So any material at a certain length becomes flexible, even no matter the thickness. So

if you're like, well, I don't really have any thin sticks or thin branches or whatever, we'll just make a really thick dart or make a thick dart that's maybe like an ancient diameter, but make it seven or nine feet long instead of five or six feet long. Okay, gosh, that's smart. PS, if you are right now plotting to make ancient weapons in your driveway, feel free to do just a tiny, imperceptible but dance and solidarity and in celebration. Also, just a little dadward advice and a legal disclaimer, please do not accidentally kill each other with these things. Thank you. But with some of Angela's advice, you're just going to be a chip off the old block. Oh, I mean, speaking of that, Clara Law is a first time question

asker and a future archaeologist who had great questions. One of them was, what is the best type of rock or your favorite rock to make weapons or tools out of? So my favorite type is obsidian because because it's so brittle, it's easier to flake and flint nap. Also obsidian comes in a wide variety of colors and shades that makes it really pretty. So there's like mahogany obsidian, which is brown, black and red speckled, there's snowflake obsidian, which has white speckles, there's rainbow obsidian, there's green obsidian, even like translucent banded obsidian, all of which I've made stone tools out of at some point. And yeah, so that's something my favorite because I think it looks the nicest. It's also one of the easier stones to make tools out of

because it's so brittle, it breaks pretty easy. That also means however, that it potentially could break in half while you're working on it, which isn't great. And I'm not sure there's an answer to the the best type of rock because they each have their drawbacks. Like I mentioned, obsidian is really sharp, but it's fragile and brittle. Chirt and flint are not as sharp, but they're much more durable. So it's just a trade off. It's whatever you're looking for, you know, whatever works best for your situation. Related, Kimberly McCall had asked, what's the best stone for edged weapons and why is it obsidian? So I believe that you've just answered that to a point, to a point.

It's not necessarily obsidian. While obsidian is very good for edged weapons, it's not necessarily the best for edged weapons. You'll notice a lot of archaeologists don't or and anthropologists don't like to make determinations of, you know, best or quality because then you get into those issues where you're calling some other culture or people's not less than or primitive or not as advanced when that's not necessarily true. Like Zealander the Tall proved with the atlattles just because something's older doesn't necessarily mean it's a less than or inferior weapon. There's no such thing as the best weapon. It's it's our best tool. It's whatever is works for that environment. And, you know, bows aren't automatically better than atlattles. Atlattles

aren't automatically better than bows. They're both better than each other at specific tasks. And actually, on the topic of Zealia, Nikki DeMarco and Jenna Mace wanted to know if there were weapons made for women. And if there's anything you've discovered on the history of female hunting or weapon use. Really good question that it's been theorized that atlattles are the most egalitarian weapon, which means that because it uses a mechanical advantage over your arm, it doesn't matter how strong you are, it's more of a finesse weapon than a strength weapon, which means that children and women potentially could have used them and use them to hunt as well. However, there's not necessarily evidence of that. It's just again, something that's possible. So I'm not

sure, you know, whether there's evidence of female hunters, but definitely with an atlattle compared to most other weapons, it's possible that women hunted. Ladies, carve those atlattles. Now on that note, patron Richard asked, have archaeologists found any kid size weapons, either doll sized or training like mini atlattles or bows? So if this is more of a finesse weapon rather than a strength weapon, could little kiddos be having little baby atlattles and trying to get little tiny baby targets? Yes. In fact, recently we found child sized atlattles in Oregon. This was excavated by the University of Alberta. And they found that the biggest atlattle was 166% larger than the smallest atlattle, which is greater than the range of hand sizes for adult humans.

So they figured like, okay, well, it might have been children that have used atlattles. I have personally taught children as young as second grade, which I'm not sure how old was that, six or seven years old. I think so. There's an elementary school here in Las Vegas. And every year for like three years, they've had me come do an atlattle throwing workshop with their second graders. You can find pictures of this on my Instagram. It's adorable. What I did was we made atlattle darts with Nerf foam ticks. Oh my God. I built a giant 10 by 10 mammoth target for them to throw at. And we built tiny little child sized atlattles out of paint stir sticks from Home Depot. Oh my gosh. And the class part of their social studies unit is learning about Ice Age humans.

So I come in, I do like a little, like maybe like a 45 minute lecture where I passed around some arrowheads, some, you know, some atlattle points. I passed around some vegetable cordage that I made. So rope made out of yucca fibers. I kind of talked to them about what ancient life specifically around hunting was like for Ice Age humans. And we go outside, I teach them how to process their own plant fibers to make rope. And then I teach them how to twist their own rope. And usually parents have to help because seven year olds don't have the greatest dexterity. It's tiny little hands and feet. And then we walk over to the atlattle target. And I let them all throw they have like an hour to throw atlattles. And it's like, some of them it's crazy how instinctive atlattle throwing can be.

Some of them have a really hard time with it. But then there's every single year, there's like three or four of these seven year olds who start throwing throwing like they've been throwing for for a decade. They start throwing as good as I am. And I've been throwing for a decade. So like sometimes like it just clicks with some people and it's completely like it doesn't matter whether it's like a boy or a girl. I've had girls throw amazingly well and boys throw amazingly well like has literally nothing to do with that, which is another point towards it being an egalitarian weapon. It's a finesse weapon. But yeah, these kids can sometimes throw incredibly well and incredible distances, even though they're using small atlattles. And the cool thing about the

child atlattles that were found in Oregon is that they were made out of well bones. So the children sized ones were made out of well bones, the adult sized ones were made out of wood. So I'm not really entirely sure what that's about. But it seems like we have a lot of the child sized ones because the bone doesn't deteriorate as much or as fast as the wood does. So we find more of these, these, you know, children sized atlattles. Yeah, I wonder if they were also passed down, you know, from child to child as they outgrew them or something. Perhaps. And the cool thing is the ones in Oregon, they were that split finger style that reduces the strain on the elbow that we more typically associate with groups that used atlattles

further south, like in Arizona or in, you know, Texas or northern Mexico. But it's the style that we actually see as far north as Oregon as well. Wow. At the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology in Boston, Massachusetts, there is a display of artifacts from the northwest coast. And these artifacts are both like, you know, prehistoric artifacts that were excavated and historic artifacts that were probably stolen from natives in that area or indigenous people in that area as depressing as that is. And one of these artifacts is a canoe action figure with two or three people sitting in it. And one of the little action figure people sitting in the canoe is holding an atlattle and using it to hunt like a seal or a whale. Oh, is that harder to do? It's the most

adorable thing. But is that hard to do sitting down? It's so hard to do sitting down. Actually, so one of my closest friends in the atlattle community is named Dr. I think he has a, I'm pretty sure he has a PhD, Dr. Richard Vanderhoek. He does indeed, I checked. He is the state archaeologist of Alaska. He specializes in Arctic Circle atlattles. He studied Arctic Circle atlattles more than anybody else. So all these different throwing board styles that are only found in the Arctic Circle. And he has this public demonstration he does where he has this like kind of fake canoe frame. And then he uses a python spray painted brown to be like a seal head. And he has participants trying to sit and throw an atlattle sitting. And the other thing is when you're aiming at like

as something like a seal head, instead of throwing at a standing target, like a mammoth, where you're standing and the target standing. So you're kind of able to conceptualize that frame of reference. When you're aiming, when you're throwing at something that's swimming, it's, you know, you're above the water and you're throwing, you're trying to arc something to hit effectively the quote unquote ground, right? The water is not the ground, but it's that plane of the ground. It's a completely different aiming system, because you're not trying to hit a standing target. You're trying to arc something to hit a seal that's like in under the water. That's out in front of you. Crazy different, really difficult. So he brought that setup to the Valley of Fire

atlattle tournament that is hosted here in Las Vegas every year for the past 30 years. And he brought that setup last year for people to try to throw sitting down. And we're talking, I mean, we have world champion atlattle throwers who have 95 plus percent accuracy at any distance of 25 meters. And they were having so much difficulty throwing sitting. It's like you just change that and suddenly people who have been throwing for decades have trouble. But yeah, child atlattles, child atlattle action figures, somehow, you know, more prevalent in the Northwest coast, we haven't really found evidence of that elsewhere, but definitely found evidence of that in the Northwest coast. Anna Valerie wants to know, if I find an arrowhead on a walk, am I required to

leave it or turn it into a museum? And Anna says, I collected a bunch of our property as a kid. And now I'm wondering if that was super illegal. What are the ethics? What's the protocol there? Okay, so definitely leave it unless you are very specific circumstances. So in general, all archaeological remains are protected in the United States. If it is on public land and you disturb it, it is, I think it's a felony, there's a fine associated with it. And there's different amounts of fines for different types of artifacts. If you are in private property, it is technically not illegal. And also there are some states that allow arrowhead or artifact collecting on public property. If it's part of like an erosion, so like on a river bank,

where those remains probably aren't the original context anyway, they were probably removed by the river. So you can pick them up. But that's a state by state basis. In general, leave them alone. The reason is because in archaeology, we get data not from the artifact itself, but from what's around the artifact where it was found. And that's called the archaeological context. And the context gives you vastly more data than the tool itself. For example, let's say you find an arrowhead, you pick it up and you bring it to a museum. Well, you probably didn't take GPS coordinates of exactly where you picked it up. And if I look at the arrowhead, I'm like, okay, well, it's an arrowhead. But if that arrowhead was still left where it was, and I was able, you know, I or another

archaeologist was able to go see it in its context, we might be able to look at the site and say, okay, this arrowhead was found next to bones of this type of animal. It was found next to a fire hearth. So maybe this was where a hunt happened. They processed the animal right here and there, built a fire, cooked it and ate it and left and they left the arrowhead behind. So now I have way more information about what that arrowhead was used for, based on what was found around the arrowhead. And very little information from the arrowhead itself, besides the fact that it's an arrowhead. Okay, that's why places like rivers where artifacts have already been moved out of their context are legal to pick up in some states because they recognize that leaving it be doesn't really

do anything anyway, because it's already been disturbed by the river. So might as well just pick it up. But again, that's state by state basis. And I would rather just leave them behind. Yeah, is it helpful at all to take a picture and drop a pin at all or no, you could let notify your local anthropology department or your local natural history museum, or every single state required by law has to have a state historic preservation office with a state historic preservation officer who is in charge of all historic and archaeological remains and sites for that state. So you could always let that person know that literally it's their job to keep track of which archaeological sites are which and where in your state. There's

a chance they probably already know about that site, especially if you're on like a well trodden path or hiking trail. But there's a chance if you're like out in the back country somewhere and you find something, leave it be, try to drop a GPS pin if you can, and let somebody at the State Historic Preservation Office know and they can send out an archaeologist to see if it's a site or not. But that's definitely something you can do, you can notify. Cool. Asia wants to know how much do you love Forged in Fire? And Christine Hottinger wants to know, relatedly, what do you hate about Forged in Fire? Also, my question, what is Forged in Fire? So Forged in Fire is a TV show where blacksmiths have competitions of who can make the best slash strongest sword or knife or

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm going to make a seven-layer bar. I always make a seven-layer bar for the center of my swords because I'm a warrior. They're not necessarily making historic recreations. I don't watch the show. I just know what the show is. I think I've seen maybe one episode, but I have no thoughts on about it. Blacksmithing and metallurgy or metalwork is definitely not my specialty. I know, you know, cursory information about Bronze Age, Iron Age, or even medieval weaponry and, you know, stuff like that. But it's not my specialty. It's not what I've studied on academic level. It's kind of just a hobby. Have you ever seen an atlattle in a movie or TV show? Have there been any movies about them? Like, what's the deal? Okay. So I'm so excited. There is a

movie about atlattles that comes out August 14th. I don't know when this episode is going to air. So it's probably, yeah, August 14th. It's called The Silencing. It stars Nikolai Kosterwaldo, who is the actor from Game of Thrones who played one of the Lannisters. In real life, Nikolai Kosterwaldo is an atlattle user. He posts videos of him using atlattles on his property on Instagram. You can go on Instagram. You can find his atlattle posts. I don't know whether he started using atlattle after filming this movie or somebody decided to write this movie for him because he uses atlattles. I don't know. But the movie is about a guy who kidnaps people and sets the moose in the forest and hunts them with an atlattle. Nikolai Kosterwaldo plays the good guy

who's trying to hunt the hunter. Oh my gosh. Okay. Of course, I look this up. And the trailer already has well over a million views. And one of the top comments reads, producers, how many times can you cut the word atlattle into the trailer? Trailer guy. Yes. Seriously, if you watch the trailer, they say the word atlattle like 10 times. It's insane. Atlattle is a main character of the movie. Even I was showing my parents this and they're like, okay, we thought when you said there's a movie about atlattles, we thought you were over exaggerating. We thought that there's a movie that had one scene with an atlattle. We didn't think like the trailer depicts this whole scene where the police have to go to an experimental archaeologist to ask what an atlattle is.

What do you think he used? Called an atlattle. Ain't no toy. It was designed to kill. And the experimental archaeologist explained this is in the trailer. He's explaining and demonstrating atlattle use and how powerful he throws it against like a pig carcass or something and just shows how powerful it is. And half the movie is them figuring out what an atlattle is because they find these wounds on these bodies and they're like, what the hell? What kind of tool made this wound? Nobody knows what it is. And it turns out it's a guy in a full ghillie suit hiding camouflage in the woods, hunting people atlattles. The whole movie's about atlattle.

It's crazy. It's crazy. So it comes out August 14th on all streaming platforms. I believe it's already out if you have direct TV. How are you going to celebrate? How are you? Are you going to wear a ghillie suit? What are you going to do? I'm going to have a watch party at my house. And like I am so excited because this is the atlattle representation in media that I've been waiting for. And the fact that they seem to be pronouncing it correctly, the representation of the atlattle seems accurate. I actually know the guy who made the atlattles for the movie. Oh my God. That's another thing. If anyone wants to buy atlattles, there's a few pretty good vendors. The only thing you have to look out

for is making sure that the dart is flexible enough. I usually, whenever I buy somebody else's atlattle darts, I'll usually like taper them myself to make them a little bit better. But anyway, this company named atlattle madness is the ones who supply the atlattles for the movie. And they look great. The movie looks great. It looks accurate. Like it's great. It's phenomenal. Dude, I'm so pumped for you. I'm so pumped for you. I'm also excited to watch this. Yeah. Yeah. The trailer alone is wild. Like I can't even imagine how crazy the movie's going to be because the trailer like gave me goosebumps from an atlattle perspective already. I'm so excited. Okay, this is going to be a hard question. What

sucks about an atlattle? Does anything what is or what is obviously irksome about your job? Um, I think it goes back to like flim flam. Whenever I see in a movie, you know, quote unquote caveman throwing a spear that's like would have been a thrusting spear and they throw it. And because of movie special effects, it goes like 70 feet at like 60 miles an hour, perfectly straight and zips through the air and kills a mammoth or something like that. I cringe. Spears are for thrusting atlattles are for throwing. You like it's not possible. You know, there's no no experiment that shows that you can throw a hand thrown spear, especially like the ones I show in movies. Any more than 20 meters and even at 20 meters,

accuracy is low, impact velocity is low. The damage is not that bad. It's not that not that great. And if you're hunting a mammoth, you're not throwing a spear like that. You're definitely using an atlattle. So whenever I see flim flam, I know that kind of stuff kind of irks me. And the other thing is, I mean, atlattles are because atlattle is a Nawa word in academia, it's not really used to describe the tool itself because it was used by so many different cultures. So it's called a spear thrower in academia. And because atlattles throw darts, not spears, I kind of cringe at that. Oh, as well. So spears can be used for stabbing, which atlattle darts are kind of too flexi for. And darts have fletching or feathers on the ass end. So so fancy.

Although it's a pretty broad term, a dart. Because if I told people that I throw darts, they think that I am in a pub somewhere in the UK. Eating bangers and mash. Yeah. So the reason the darts that we throw at dartboards are even called darts is because it comes from a Roman thing called a plumbata, which is basically a giant lawn dart that they would throw underhand that would go up into the air with a big lead weight and feathers in the back. And then like a lawn dart, it would kind of like just drop straight down over shield walls. And if you look at a plumbata, if you like look up a plumbata, it looks exactly like just a big version of a of a throwing dart. But the the dart part comes from the fact that it has fletchings

because a spear or a javelin doesn't have fletchings. But but darts do have fletching. So anyway, I kind of cringe at those two things, calling it a spear thrower, even though I have to because that's the correct academic term for it. And whenever I see a movie where somebody throws a spear a bajillion miles an hour, I'm like, nope, that's not how that works at all. A difficult question. You know what it is. It's your favorite thing about atlattles. How are you? How are you going to pick? How do you? Yeah, the last the last two hours of this interview is my favorite part about atlattles. There's nothing, there's no bad like, it's the craziest, coolest thing that no one, very few people are aware of or have heard of.

That's correct. We recorded a two hour interview, and then we chatted another 45 minutes afterward. And yes, this was very hard to cut down because this dude has so much knowledge in his brainball. And you know what? I have an answer. My favorite thing, not about atlattles, but about what I do with atlattles and what my role is as a board member for the World Atlattles Association, the education outreach that I get to do is my favorite part about archaeology. I am most comfortable teaching people about things that I'm passionate about. And there's nothing I'm more passionate about than atlattles. And I love teaching people about atlattles. So I have done atlattle throwing workshops for elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, university groups, museums,

the Bureau of Land Management, National State Park Service, the State Historic Preservation Office. Anytime I can tell a group of people about atlattles and teach them how to throw it, especially when it's little kids whose eyes just light up when they learn about a weapon they've never heard about, and they have the ability to throw a small little spear or a small little dart, like 50, 60, 70 feet with this atlattle tool, and their eyes just light up, and that's the best part. Teaching people, having the public interaction is the best part, because I think that science without communication, science without education is pointless. The reason we do science is in order to create a better society, in order to educate the public, and science communication is my favorite

part of what I do. I'm sure it's also great when you're going out there, you're in the desert, you're just getting out of the car, you've got a bunch of darts, and you're just ready to practice. That's got to be so fun. It's so much fun. I always get so many weird looks when I roll up to places. There's probably a 12-month period where I had an atlattle and three darts in my car perpetually, just stretched over the entirety of my sedan. Anywhere I'd go, people were like, what is in your car? I was like, oh, they're 30,000-year-old throwing spears, but don't worry about it. Let's hear a little bit more about this sedan, the atlattle vehicle. My license plate says atlattle is a gift from my sister. I love it. You can catch me driving around Las Vegas with the

atlattle car, wearing my atlattle t-shirts. The funny thing is, I actually had a friend who called me once and said, you wouldn't believe. I was just at the mall, and I saw a car with atlattle license plates. That means that there's somebody else in Las Vegas besides you who throws atlattles. I said, why would that be your first conclusion? Why would you not just assume that that was my car? I was like, you went to the extremely unlikely scenario that there's somebody else as atlattle obsessed as me who got atlattle license plates, instead of just assuming that it was me who was driving that car, and it was me. That's the best. If you're ever in Southern Nevada and you see an atlattle sedan, just beep, beep. Hi, hi.

Yep. Yep. I've gotten definitely weird looks. A lot of people think that I'm like an Atlanta Falcons or Atlanta Braves fan because ATL, ATL. Right. Nope. Nope. It's atlattles. It's ancient, ancient throwing weapons. Well, you won't be alone. I think after this episode, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be pumped about atlattles, myself included. I hope so. I hope so. And if anybody is making or throwing atlattles, they have questions. They want to talk to me about atlattles more. There's nothing more I love than talk atlattles. So I am available. My DMs are open for any atlattle related questions. That's great. You're going to watch out. You're going to get a barrage. That's okay. Yeah. I also do axe throwing and knife throwing, and I throw

slings, and I make my own slings as well. So I do a little bit of everything. I think one thing that's really admirable about you, too, is that you really do put yourself out there in a way that lets these opportunities kind of open up to you. That's really infectious. I think that's such a good lesson. Well, thank you. I like to pride myself that my passion for things is my favorite part about myself. I just dive. I dive deep, and I just want to share that with as many people as possible. You do a very good job. I'm so excited to watch this atlattle movie now. This atlattle movie is going to be so good. So ask smart people stupid questions about their obsessions, and before you know, hear carbon stuff in the backyard and watching horror flicks involving

a man in a moss-covered onesie. Now, for more napped obsidian and elegantly chucked weaponry, follow Angelo on Twitter and Instagram. He's at, I Dig It First, with a one for the first. You can check out the World Atlattle Association at worldatlattle.org. You can also check out Angelo's podcast, which is not at all about atlattles, but rather about his other passion, which is samples in pop music. It's called Sample Excavator, and that's at Sample Excavator on Twitter and Instagram. It's wonderful. And that movie is The Silencing, and it's out August 14th. We make $0 off of talking about it. Just thought it was interesting. And for more links to all of this, you can see alleyword.com slash oligies slash experimental archeology. And there's going

to be a link to that in the show notes, as well as to the Black Trial Collective. And we write oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at alleyword with one L on both, oligiesmerch, is that oligiesmerch.com. And we have all manner of ways to show your oligies love. Thank you to Shannon, Falters and Bonnie Dutch, two sisters who host the Comedy Podcast. You are that for managing our merch. Thank you, Erin Talber for admitting the oligies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Emily White and all the oligies podcast transcribers. And Caleb Patton, who bleeps the episodes transcripts and kids safe, bleeped episodes are up for free at alleyword.com slash oligies slash extras. There's a link to that in the show notes, too. Thank you, Noel Dilworth, who gets all the

interviews scheduled and more. And to assistant editor, Mr. Jared Sleeper, who hosts the Mental Health Podcast, My Good Bad Brain, and who absolutely wants to go to the desert and fling these things. And to the Fletchings on our darts, Stephen Ramors, who is a lead editor, he also hosts the podcast The Percast about kitties and see Jurassic Wright about dinosaurs. And Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, you know, I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is that if you can hear any bumping upstairs, that's my parents. We're getting ready to go to the doctor to take my dad to get his staples out. And they are waiting for me. And I have about two minutes to get up there and out into the car. Okay.

Um, next week. See you then. Yeah, okay, bye-bye. Oh, I'm a little grimy and sweaty here.