The bow available to prehistoric peoples wasn’t accurate enough to kill game reliably beyond, perhaps, 35 m. Because of this hard limitation hunters had to be able to approach game, such as ungulates, to within that distance.
This is incredibly hard to do. Many ungulates have somewhat poor eyesight but are excellent at motion detection. Being herd animals, a startle by one causes all the rest to flee.
Given this behavior, hunters must put thought into the question of controlling animal’s flight or movement. There are a couple of approaches. In one approach archers must be stationed (sometimes in trees) in areas that the hunters think the animals will run. The animals are then deliberately moved – often in a battue.
In the other approach the landscape must be tailored in some way to increase the probability that the animals will run in a desired direction. This is the origin of the ‘kite’ or game-drive system (and, I am convinced, with the cursus in England, or the mustatil in Arabia).[1]
Getting back to the original point I have recently come across three or four readings to justify the idea of the relatively short range accuracy of prehistoric archery.
The earliest that I have is V. Stefánsson who was visiting the Eskimo in the Coronation Gulf area of northern Canada, south of Victoria Island. Of their archery he says this:
"As to the efficiency of the bow: Tolerable accuracy; such as is needed in shooting birds, is not secured beyond a range of twenty-five or thirty yards. Against caribou the effective range varies with different archers generally between seventy-five and ninety yards; and is probably not over one hundred." [2]
About the same period the explorer, Diamond Jenness, visited the Copper Eskimo who also live in the area around Coronation Gulf, on Victoria Island, and southern Banks Island. He, too, tested their archery skills and reports this:
"My own observations led me to a less favourable conclusion. Ikpakhuak was reputed to be one of the best bowmen in Dolphin and Union strait, and the maximum distance he could send an arrow was about 125 yards. Even at a fixed target his marksmanship was indifferent. During the summer of 1915 the natives set up a clod of earth about a foot square for a target. They went back forty paces and tried their skill, but only about one shot in twenty hit the mark. The men seemed to be no more accurate than the children, though, their bows being stronger, their arrows flew with more velocity. Two of the women joined in the sport, using their husbands' or their children's bows; they acquitted themselves hardly less creditably than the others. I frequently watched the men shooting at ptarmigan and water-fowl, and without exception their marksmanship was poor. It was no better even with larger game. They could hardly fail to hit a caribou at fifteen or twenty yards when the animal was stationary, but I have seen them miss a running deer at this range. They themselves admit that the bow is of little use at distances greater than about thirty yards." [3]
Rasmussen visited the Inuit near King William’s Island in 1922-3. While there he had occasion to observe the Inuit’s archery. He says this:
"When I was there most grown men still had bows and arrows, but the impression I received from their shooting practice was no great one. A record of ten archers showed that scarcely any one of them could hit the mark with anything like certainty at a range of about twenty metres and it is difficult to get so near to caribou. As soon as the range is up to thirty to fifty metres the arrow, although losing little of its power to kill, only hits the mark by what is more or less accident."[4]
Blehr summarizes these these readings like this:
“From the Arctic we know that Inuit archers were able to hit a stationary target with accuracy only within a range of about 23 meters (Stefánsson 1914, p. 96; Rasmussen 1931, p. 170; cf. Jenness 1922, p. 146).” [5]
The hard limit proposed here may be from 23 or 35 or 100 m for effective use of the bow against ungulates. The reader will keep in mind that to approach animals at this distance is difficult and not often crowned with success. It is for this reason that so much prehistoric hunting involved a communal effort. D.B. Shimkin, in his ethnographic study of the Shoshone says
"These migrations consequently restricted effective, large-scale hunting of the buffalo to a short period in the spring, a longer one in the fall. At other times the beasts were too scattered pr tpp (sic, 'or too') far in enemy territory for major exploitation. These habits, combined with the buffalo's wariness and keen hearing, made hunting necessarily collective, organized. It was a case of sudden mass slaughter or virtually none at all. Once the animals were scared--even by a single careless individual--they would flee long distances, possibly completely out of the tribe's range.". (emphases are mine) [6]
Next time I will deal with those hunting systems that do not involve drive game systems but which rely, instead, on shepherding game into defiles or valleys.
Footnotes
[1] Cursus: Maguire [2015] reviews the evidence. For the ‘mustatil’ see Thomas et al. [2021]. Thomas gives an overview of the phenomenon and proposes all the usual anthro-junk. There is a readable popular account with photographs in Cascone [2021].
[2] Stefánsson [1914] 96.
[3] Jenness [1922] 146
[4] Rasmussen [1931] 170.
[5] Blehr [2014] 234. And on p. 235: “Due to the arrow’s limited range, and the ungulates’ flight behaviour, various forms of communal hunting dominated all over the world until the gun replaced the bow and arrow … ”
[6] Shimkin [1947] 266.
Bibliography
Blehr [2014] : Blehr, Otto. 'Elk hunting in Northern Sweden during the Stone Age', Fornvannen (109), 233-242. 2014. Online here.
Cascone [2021] : Cascone, Sarah. 'Archaeologists Say a Mystifying Group of Ancient Monuments in Saudi Arabia Suggests the Existence of a Prehistoric Cattle Cult' in artnet news, May 4, 2021. Online here.
Jenness [1922] : Jenness, Diamond. Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913-18; Volume XII: The Life of the Copper Eskimo. Ottawa, F.A. Acland Printer, Canada. 1922. Diamond Jenness, p. 146 which is found here.
Maguire [2015] : Maguire, Kristyn M., 'Topographical Relationships between Cursus Monuments in the Upper Thames Valley', Thesis submitted for the Master of Science in Applied Landscape Archaeology in the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, 2015. Online here.
Rasmussen [1931] : Rasmussen, K., 1931. The Netsilik Eskimos. Social life and spiritual culture. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–1924, 8(2). Copenhagen. Online here.
Shimkin [1947] : Shimkin, D.B., Anthropological Records:5:4; Wind River Shoshone Ethnogeography. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1947. Online here.
Stefánsson, V., 1914. The Stefánsson-Anderson Arctic Expedition of the American Museum. Preliminary ethnological report. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 14. New York. 1914. Online here or here.
Thomas et al. [2021] : Thomas, Hugh with Melissa A. Kennedy, Matthew Dalton, Jane McMahon, David Boyer and Rebecca Repper. 'The mustatils: cult and monumentality in Neolithic north-western Arabia'. Antiquity, 95(381), 605-626. Online here.
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