Beneath the Military Horizon : Measuring Stone Age Hunter Weapon Point Technology at the Ecological Scale

Stone Age hunter-gatherer weapon studies should hold a more central position within war studies since the vast majority of human weapons ever in existence were once used by these types of societies. Among these weapons, the projectile, or the weapon point, is arguably the most numerous and well-studied in both archaeological and ethnographical contexts. However, from a warfare and conflict perspective, the study of weapon points in Stone Age and hunter-gatherer societies is beset by two substantial and intertwined issues: (i) the problem of categorizing and defining violent activities and (ii) the problem of identifying functions for weapon points. The thesis of this paper is that by turning to the ecological scale, i.e. the epistemology and ontology of Ecological Psychology and Dynamic Systems Theory (EP DST), these issues can be approached constructively. The ecological scale offers a consistent relational framework to quantitatively address weapon point property variation, covariation, historical and practical specificity, as well as experimental principles to quantitatively study emergent patterns in human-weapon point-environment relations. Archaeological studies and experiments with EP DST principles could potentially reveal how organisms, environment and emergent patterns affect the properties of a weapon point in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, given the typically intimate relationship between craft, body and usage. How this could be accomplished is exemplified with the Northern Eurasian inset point, an object that has been found in association with human bodies in Mesolithic Scandinavia. Hence, through EP DST perspectives and approaches, weapons points can be re-socialised in order to reveal their more specific or contextual conflict related dimensions.