Kites, Dragons, and other Traps2

Ancient myths and stories lead us to think that hunting among the Greeks was a solitary activity.   for example Actaeon is accompanied only by his hounds during his famous encounter with the godhead.   Herakles overcame the Cerynaean Hind and the Erymanthian Boar without the help of beaters and Odysseus is alone when he encounters the stag on Circe's island.    A gold ring from shaft grave IV at Mycenae depicts an archer pursuing deer (Cervus elaphus?) from a chariot.   He is accompanied only by his charioteer.

Of course the old stories, paintings, seals or metalwork are not textbooks of hunting;   These fabulous narratives prioritize the moment of encounter and the courage, the determination, or the blind defiance of the protagonists.[1]

Despite the stories, in the Greek world it would have been much more common to hunt in groups.   Certain types of game, boar (Sus scrofa) for example or aurochs (Bos primigenius), are so dangerous that even the myths don't contradict the common wisdom that it would be mad for them to be pursued  by individuals.  The Calydonian boar, for example, can only be subdued by a group which consisted of Meleager and his uncles.[2]  Odysseus is with a hunting party when he is wounded by a wild boar in Odyssey xix.

Hunting in groups would also have been common in the Bronze Age.  The Mycenaeans would not have supposed that the princes of that ancient town customarily traversed the countryside in lonely chariots hoping to encounter a deer.   

The taking of deer (or other ungulates) was such an important activity for the community that it always involved a large group.  The actual shooting of deer would be just the middle stage of a large and elaborate production.  Crucial preparations were carried out before the killing and a long series of necessary activities after it.  Supplying the community with meat involved large numbers of beaters, dogs, nets, and a number of spearmen and/or archers, along with all the necessary machinery for butchering, preserving, caching, and distributing the bag.[3]    One can compare this assemblage to that of Bathurst Inlet in Canada where we find not only killing site(s) but evidence of all the other activities to which I alluded above; an entire landscape devoted to the taking and processing of game.[4a]

For the prehistoric period we have few direct glimpses of communal hunting.  There is some suggestive evidence from the cave at Klissoura that deer could be trapped in the narrow valley and slaughtered. [4]  The ring I mentioned suggests that at least some deer were taken by archers (the other alternative is lances).  One of the gold cups from Vapheio depicts a group of hunters pursuing the Aurochs (Bos primigenius) 

 

Upper panel shows Aurochs being pursued with nets.

This depiction confirms several things.  Groups were involved in a hunt.   The presence of nets shows us that hunting relied on techniques (this could include hedges and woven panels) which funneled the game into a small space where killing and/or capturing was simplified.

In the ancient world hunting techniques were structured so that game was not just encountered by chance.  As I mentioned above game-killing was a semi-industrial activity involving large groups of beaters driving game down fixed routes and into the arms of the killers and the processors.  

How were these fixed routes determined and how did the ambushers know where to wait?  Since at least the Paleolithic communities have laid out boundaries in long lines to guide animals.[4b]  These boundaries could consist of stone walls, lines of cairns, nets, hedges, or combinations of berm and ditch.    These 'game lines' or 'kites' are found all over the world and suggest that groups of humans driving (usually migrating) game into killing traps has been the norm for the last ten thousand years.  These kites, particularly common in the lands around the Levant, derive their name from the period after World War I when pilots  were flying the mails from Cairo to Damascus and Babylon.  Looking down they noticed many stone structures, of unknown purpose, laid out in long lines.  The various shapes of the resulting figures suggested 'kites' or 'desert dragons'.  

  Here's an example of such a kite in Jordan seen from an altitude of ~660 m.  The guide lines ('the funnel') are shown truncated at the upper and lower left.  The corral structure is about 100 m. from E to W and the funnel line that leads to it (the upper left) is about 700 m long.  The circles at the vertices are probably shooting positions.  They average about 2.5 - 3 m in diameter.  The intended game here is antelope.

Desert kite in Lebanon
at 32.177468° N,  37.224406° E

The game drive technique is easy to implement.   Communal groups lay out long lines of stones or cairns along the route which they wish the game to take.   Where they begin these lines or 'rays' are wide apart but are made to gradually converge to form a V-shaped funnel.  The game are driven into the open end of this funnel.   Groups of men and boys (usually at some small distance) wave their arms and make noises such that the game gradually end up in a corral (or are made to walk past shooting positions which are often merely pits or circles of stones).    There are variations, of course.  The end position is often hidden by a break in the slope so that the creatures cannot see where they are going until it is too late.  The end position may place the game against a body of water into which they might be forced.  Sometimes the end position may be a dead fall - such the situation among the Blackfoot Indians already mentioned.

An organization called 'Globalkites' makes available an online database of such kites.  This database records more than 6000 such structures across much of the old world. [5]  Because they do not yet include kites for Nubia, Tibet, Europe or the Americas their count of game-drive systems is probably half the real number.[6]

A coverage map by the Globalkites group.  The
areas where kites are recorded include West Africa, Saudi Arabia,
Lebanon, Syria, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. 

A variant of such a 'game drive system' is also used for hunting caribou and reindeer.  Game-taking on the open tundra in this manner has been practiced since the Paleolithic.  

 John Olsen documents the hunting of raindeer in southern Norway (Lake Vangavatnet) [8] by the use of an impound system [A] that he terms a 'funnel-trap' 

Olsen's caption:
"The system at Slådalen in Reinheimen area was almost three kilometres long and consisted of upright poles. Here, the animals were herded into an enclosure before being moved in groups to the killing ground (ill. by Norwegian Institute for Nature Research)."

This is a good example of a game drive system on [9]   The trap is nothing but a series of upright poles into which the reindeer are driven.  Once they're funneled into the corral they can be sorted for domestication or killing.  

What is genuinely counter-intuitive about this method of hunting is that these stone lines (even when they are continuous) are rarely very high; in all cases the game can easily step over them but do not do so.[7] 

Scotland provides examples of a rather different type of game drive systems.  The Reverend Donald Maclean (1796) gives an account of such a system on the island of Rum in the inner Hebrides: "Before the use of fire arms, their method of killing deer was as follows: On each side of a glen, formed by two mountains, stone dykes were begun pretty high in the mountains, and carried to the lower part of the valley, always drawing nearer, till within 3 or 4 feet of each other.  From this narrow pass, a circular space was enclosed by a stone wall, of a height sufficient to confine the deer ; to this place they were pursued and destroyed. The vestige of one of these enclosures is still to be seen in Rum." [10]

It appears that game drive systems in Scotland did not always consist of walls.   Dean Monro tells us that sometimes it was only necessary to drive game between two bodies of water.  On the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides the Dean tells us that

"… there are two salt water lochs meeting each other through the middle of the island to within half a mile. And all the deer of the west part of the forest will be brought by an encircling movement to that narrow entry, and the next day brought west again by the same movement, through the same narrow place, and an infinite number of deer will be slain there." [B] 

The area of Jura under discussion.  The red circle is centered on Tarbert Bay
and extends to Tarbert Loch on the W.  Today this is a distance of 0.77 miles.
The possible route onto which the deer were forced may be at the red arrow. 

Narrow valleys or glens would suffice for the channeling of deer.

Glen of the Bar (55.007110° N, 4.380103° W) is a narrow valley reputed as a place for trapping deer.

Glen of the Bar.  Letter 'A' marks the
high point of the valley and the spectator
lookout.

Glen of the Bar from the lookout.
View is to S. 

Another drive system installed on 'low ground' is at Loch Ruthven.  "The Strathnairn Elrick is near the east end of Loch Ruthven, on the low ground, where there is a pass or small glen, overlooked by a 'cragan'."[11]  

Watson may be referring to the low ground here:  57.323329° N, 4.247311° W.  The map shows it as 'Elrig'.

The word 'Elrick' or 'Elrig' features often as a place name in Scotland.  The word means 'Deer Trap'. [12]

Summary

Hunting in antiquity was often carried out by large groups.  Sometimes, as with boar, the quarry was too dangerous to approach by one person.

But even Hunting of ungulates in antiquity was often carried out by large groups of people taking multiple deer at the same time.

This activity was seasonal.  Does going north with baby deer to feeding grounds after birthing.

What was used were narrow valleys, netted or hedged structures, as well as lines of rocks, cairns or poles which would serve to draw the deer (Red Deer, Fallow Deer, Roe Deer) or other ungulates (antelope, gazelle, reindeer, caribou) into a central killing or capture zone.  These drive structures were usually accompanied by specific hides or ambush sites..

Kill sites Hunting was often not just an activity.  It was a landscape.  That is because many other activities are necessitated by large kills.  Such connected activities would include butchering, skinning and skin preparation, cooking, drying or preserving, and caching.   

Footnotes

[1] Homer's heroes are the preëminent examples.  Idomeneus' courage is compared to the defiance and pugnacity of the wild boar (Sus scrofa) at Il. xiii.  Odysseus is likewise compared to a boar in Il. xvii and, at the conclusion of that same book only the fury of the wild boar is adequate to describe the defiance of 'the two Ajaxes' as they turn to face the pursuing Trojans.   By the time of the Classical and Hellenistic this idea of hunting as a kind of individual determination has been ethicized into the supreme preparation for both warfare and citizenship.  Xenophon's Cynegeticus xviii: "Therefore I charge the young not to despise hunting or any other schooling. For these are the means by which men become good in war and in all things out of which must come excellence in thought and word and deed."  Plato, Protagoras iii.22: "Consequently they (early peoples, rhc) were devoured by wild beasts, since they were in every respect the weaker, and their technical skill, though a sufficient add to their nurture, did not extend to making war on the beasts, for they had not the art of politics, of which the art of war is a part."  Hunting is an important preparation for the 'Guardians' in Plato Rep, viii: " ... not basing his claim to office on ability to speak or anything of that sort but on his exploits in war or preparation for war, and he would be a devotee of gymnastics and hunting."

[2] For Meleager and the Calydonian Boar see this.

[3] Benedict [2005] 430-431 stresses the structures associated with the drive game system in Bathurst Inlet region, in Canada.   Besides drive lines the immediate landscape includes constructed caches (some elaborate), kayak racks, and dwellings.  Among the Blackfoot indians of Montana and southern Alberta  province the primary kill method was of Bison in deadfalls.  Where drive sites did not end in dead falls there were  inevitably corrals.   Such falls and traps generated so much meat that there arose the need for a variety of structures such as for quartering of carcasses,  crushing bone and extracting marrow, boiling and roasting of meat, as well as meat caching (Zedeño et al. [2014] 37).   

[4] In the Klissoura cave in northern Argolid deer were represented in every level from the mid-Paleolithic to the Mesolithic. Stiner et al. [2010] 314.  Klisoura Cave 1 is fronted by a narrow valley and suggests that it was used as an early game-drive system.  As food: Starkovich [2012] 13, " ..., previous studies indicate that the archaeofaunas at Klissoura Cave 1 are dominated by a single species, fallow deer (Dama dama) ... .  The taxon comprises 60-91% of species-specific identifications in the Middle Paleolithic, and 12-78% in the Upper Paleolithic and later layers, though there is variation between assemblages, particularly in later periods ... "  The existence of some 50 clay-covered hearths suggests that meat preparation and cooking may have been done on a large scale.  Karkanas et al. [2004] 522 say that the hearths at Klissoura Cave 1 were associated with bones of fallow deer (Dama dama), hare (Lepus europaeus), rock partridge (Alectoris graeca) and Great Bustard (Otis tarda).

Elsewhere the Red deer (C. elephas) is represented, e.g. in the Franchthi Cave. Douka et al. [2011] 1143.

[4a] Benedict [2005] 432, "At times during the past, the Copper Inuit or their Thule ancestors established substantial settlements near game-drive sites along caribou migration routes. Facilities for drying and storing large quantities of meat were associated."

[4b]  It may be appropriate to mention here the hypothesis that the cursuses of Britain, Scotland, and Ireland are an early form of game drive system.  Fletcher [2011] position 1074 says "I hesitate to suggest that they may ever have served as a means for killing deer ... but similar constructions were later to be used to direct deer."  What seems most compelling to me is that at one of them, Woldgate Cursus terminal at Rudgate in Yorkshire, arrowheads were found.  The specific spot is here: 54.076233° N, 0.320543° W.   Woldgate Cursus is reviewed in McOmish and Tuck [2002] 28 who provide a photograph of the arrowheads.  The Woldgate Cursus is also described at this website and this website.  There are a number of fantastical theories about the construction and use of cursuses.  These theories are reviewed in Maguire [2015]. 

[5] Globalkites is here; their interactive map is here.

[6] Nubia:  Storemyr [2021].  Tibet: Fox and Dorji [2009];  North America: Colorado: Benedict [1975], Benedict [2005]; Brink [2005]; Canada: O'Shea et al  [2013];  Norway: Olsen [2013]; Scotland and England: Watson [1913]; Fletcher [2011].

[7] Benedict [2005] 432 quoting Stefánsson [1921]:  "'It seems absurd,' wrote Stefánsson (1921, p. 402), 'that two stones, one on top of the other, reaching an elevation of only a foot, should be feared as much by the caribou as actual persons but that appears to be the fact.'

[A] An 'impound' system drives the animals into a corral where the priority is to capture and domesticate them.

[8] Olsen [2013] fig. 14. No page numbers in the online edition.  The position is at roughly this location:  61.853444° N, 8.962183° E

[10] Watson [1913] 162.  The island of Rum is here: 56.999030 N, 6.329717° W.

[B} As reported in Watson [1913] 161.  Translation is by Fletcher [2011].  The Kindle position is 1427.

[11] Watson [1913] 164.

[12] For etymology and definition see Watson [1913] 163: "The Elrick was an enclosure, usually in relatively low ground, into which deer were driven by the 'tinchell'."  Tinchell, also tainchell, are beaters.  

Also in Fletcher [2011] : "I wish to mention briefly the Scottish equivalent known in Gaelic as an elrick, or sometimes also referred to as elerc, an Old Irish word in origin which refers to the spot at which driven deer might be ambushed in a narrow defile."  No page numbers in the online edition where the position is given as 1384.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[2] Feldman and Sauvage [2010] 133.

[3] Evenson [2002]  "A lone hunter from the light background turns and faces to the right, poising to spear a stag who is running left towards him across the wavy zone-change line (cat. no. 16H43). These central opponents are, in de Jong’s reconstruction, the only figures who strike active poses, the other hunters and dogs moving in processional form across the panels."

[4] Halstead [2002]  "The same general observations can be made from this year’s work as were made last year: the material is strikingly more mixed anatomically, taxonomically and taphonomically than the big groups of burnt bone studied in 2000; by far the commonest taxa are pig and sheep; and red deer continue to be the commonest wild animal"

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