Arrow to the heart of Mesoamerican vanishing geography

[_SuperDell]

So simple. Joseph Smith was a wrestler - supposed to be good in his time. Bow and Arrow is a wrestling hold - illegal in High School - but Joe did not attend High School so did not know this. It is used in the Book of Mormon - as we all know those folks were "ripped", strong and athletic and used the Bow and Arrow to punish, kill and for all sorts of mean stuff.

Joe used words he know, right? So Bow and Arrow makes sense if you believe that - in a FARMS kind of alternate universe, maybe?

[_Simon Southerton]

Sort of a private message for Dr. S: is there a way to get in touch with the Aussie exmo group?

I used to live in Canberra, and i suspect we have several acquaintances in common.

We have an "Australian Mormon Stories Support Group" and I'm one of the moderators. If you ask to join and fill out a brief questionnaire you'll get in no worries.

[_Simon Southerton]

Bill Hamblin has done most of the bow and arrow apologetics. This link takes you to a VERY padded out 19 page paper discussing the bow and arrow.

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/vie ... additional

The best he can do is quote a chapter in a textbook from 1971 that quotes from studies in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. All well before radio carbon dating so they are utterly unreliable in terms of dating. He then cites a bunch of studies about arrow points but they are almost certainly points used in atlatl darts. You can tell from the way he writes, that the evidence is weak. He finishes off by claiming, since the bow and arrow were definitely in Mesoamerica in 400AD, this satisfies the criterion of fitting into the Book of Mormon period, move along folks. Oh, and yes, I kid you not, he even offers the atlatl as a possible bow.

Hamblin's apologetics completely fails to address the problem that the Book of Mormon claims the bow and arrow were widely used in Mesoamerica since 600BC.

[_Physics Guy]

How hard is it to make a useful bow? My dad used to hack together toy bows for us kids out of branches and twine but those were hardly real bows. Do you need special wood and a special string to get the power that makes a real bow effective? Is there some really tricky technique involved in making a useful bow? Or do you really just need the basic concept and then some practice with ordinary materials?

How did the Maya adopt the bow, when they finally did adopt it? Did they have to start growing a new kind of tree to make bowstaves, or something? Or was it enough to just have the idea of bows, to be able to make bows that were better than atlatls? Was there a massive culture-wide forehead slapping among the Maya over bows? D'oh, why did we stick with those wretched atlatls all this time when we could have been making these bow things for a thousand years already?

If all that the Maya were missing was the simple idea of a bow, then the Nephites would surely have brought that idea, and it would be really hard to believe that an idea like this one would just die out. We're not talking about a tricky secret technology like Greek fire, here.

If however there was a real material or technical bottleneck for the Maya in adopting bows, then it's conceivable that Nephites might have arrived in the New World, tried to make bows like they knew out of lousy New World materials, and been disgusted with how the flimsy Mesoamerican bowstaves always snapped, and the wretched tapir sinew bowstrings just sagged, and overall you were never going to bring down a curelom with this piece of crap. You might as well forget the string and just use the staff to fling the arrow by swinging.

I have no idea. Exactly how bows came to the Maya ought to be a pretty interesting story quite apart from Mormon pseudo-history. How much do we know about the episode? How much can we guess?

[_tapirrider]

Hamblin's was from 1990
https://publications.mi.byu.edu/book/Washington ... of-mormon/

Hamblin didn't mention this from 1988:

Adoption of the Bow in Prehistoric North America, John H. Blitz, North American Archaeologist, Vol. 9 (2), 1988
http://anthropology.United Airlines.edu/reprints/22.pdf
See figure 1 on page 10 of the pdf file.

More from Blitz in 2013:

Introduction: Social Complexity and the Bow in the Prehistoric North American Record
Paul M. Bingham Joanne Souza John H. Blitz
http://anthropology.United Airlines.edu/reprints/978.pdf

Social Complexity and the Bow in the Eastern Woodlands
John H. Blitz Erik S. Porth
http://anthropology.United Airlines.edu/reprints/977.pdf

[_Physics Guy]

An interesting article. From it I learned that no actual pre-European bows seem to have survived for archaeologists to find, but that stone tips in distinctly different size ranges have been found all over the Americas and the hypothesis which has been accepted, after a fair amount of careful consideration, is that the smaller stones were arrowheads while the larger ones were spear or javelin heads.

The article does note a period of several centuries in the Arctic when arrowheads stopped turning up, having been found both previously and subsequently. The conjecture offered is that the people in this Arctic region did not actually stop using bows in that time, but rather switched to hunting at sea for climatic reasons, so that the arrowheads from those centuries are all at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean instead of on land.

The article doesn't address my question of how hard it was to make decent bows, but I think that this is probably a statement by omission. The article is explicitly about the spread of bows throughout the Americas and nowhere does it mention any material constraints on the process. Instead the article takes it for granted that if people saw bows being used by other people, the first people could soon make their own bows.

[_tapirrider]

The article doesn't address my question of how hard it was to make decent bows, but I think that this is probably a statement by omission. The article is explicitly about the spread of bows throughout the Americas and nowhere does it mention any material constraints on the process. Instead the article takes it for granted that if people saw bows being used by other people, the first people could soon make their own bows.

This Smithsonian report from 1894 has much more technical information that might help you.
https://archive.org/details/northameric ... og/page/n7

[_honorentheos]

An interesting article. From it I learned that no actual pre-European bows seem to have survived for archaeologists to find, but that stone tips in distinctly different size ranges have been found all over the Americas and the hypothesis which has been accepted, after a fair amount of careful consideration, is that the smaller stones were arrowheads while the larger ones were spear or javelin heads.

The article does note a period of several centuries in the Arctic when arrowheads stopped turning up, having been found both previously and subsequently. The conjecture offered is that the people in this Arctic region did not actually stop using bows in that time, but rather switched to hunting at sea for climatic reasons, so that the arrowheads from those centuries are all at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean instead of on land.

The article doesn't address my question of how hard it was to make decent bows, but I think that this is probably a statement by omission. The article is explicitly about the spread of bows throughout the Americas and nowhere does it mention any material constraints on the process. Instead the article takes it for granted that if people saw bows being used by other people, the first people could soon make their own bows.

One of our former posters who spent a great deal of time with the Mesoamerican setting question (beastie) used a phrase that captures what I think you are getting at - the Nephite-shaped hole.

Much of the apologetic for the Mesoamerican setting includes apologists variably arguing for Nephite influence on the native population when they see something as derivative from a claim in the Book of Mormon, or the disproportionate size of the Nephites compared to the pre-existing native cultures leading to the obliteration of any real evidence for Nephites being left in the archeological record.

As beastie contended on multiple occasions, it just doesn't work like that. Even if the Nephites were a small, subsumed population the Old World technologies described in the Book of Mormon would have been adopted and spread out through the wider population. And following standard archeological practices one ought to be able to find the center of trade and innovation migration to some extent to have a general idea of the region where the Nephites were located. The Book of Mormon even describes this happening where an armored, sword wielding Nephite army takes on a skin-clad Lamanite army and decimates them. The next time the Lamanites show up for battle, they've adopted the Nephite forms of armor and arms. The Nephites had unique currency, agriculture, weaponry, armor, metallurgy and the tech to smelt, oceanic ship building capabilities, city-craft, animal husbandry with many, many domesticated species described, etc., etc., etc. Surely had the native population encountered this, especially one as advanced and capable as the Mayans, they would have adopted and further innovated.

But there is no such evidence available to follow back to the Nephite-shaped hole where they should originate from. And that apparently includes bow technology.

[_Shulem]

The Book of Mormon narrative is clear that Nephi's family brought with them the knowledge they possessed from the Old World, all of it. They brought the scriptures. They brought the knowledge of ship building to include the bellows for smelting tools. They brought the knowledge of how to construct a fine building like the temple in Jerusalem. They brought the knowledge of how to hunt including the bow and arrow -- an invention that could never be to lost to a civilization that once possessed it. The idea of the bow and arrow being lost in the New World from a civilization growing out of itself is simply impossible.

And it came to pass that I did arm them with bows, and with arrows, with swords, and with cimeters, and with clubs, and with slings, and with all manner of weapons which we could invent, and I and my people did go forth against the Lamanites to battle.

All manner of weapons which they could invent or craft -- to include the bow and arrow. But we know Joseph Smith didn't know any better and invented the story just like he invented the Explanations of Facsimile No. 3 which are utter BS.

[_Physics Guy]

The Smithsonian report from 1894 is too long for me to read, but a quick skim seems to indicate that lots of different kinds of bows got made. Some were sophisticated but some were simple. So it would indeed seem that if you had seen bows, you could figure out how to make useful versions of them for yourself pretty much anywhere in the Americas. Especially if one was familiar with spears or javelins, the idea of a smaller javelin that got shot very fast from a bow would be pretty easy to grasp.