Ice Age at Reed Continues (With Mammoth-Killing Atlatls)

Photographer: Adrian Keller-Feld

While most Paideia classes were taught indoors (or not at all) due to icy-slick roads and frigid temperatures, sophomore Henry Griffin could be found on the Great Lawn with those brave enough to partake in “Atlatl Madness.” Griffin, on the Friday and Saturday of Paideia week (January 19 and 20), taught their fellow students both the history and technique of the spear-throwing mechanism known as the atlatl. 

Griffin, who has been throwing atlatls for around seven years, after being introduced to them by a friend, organized their Paideia class for the first time this year. Most of the learning in Griffin’s course was through experience: participants took turns choosing between different sizes of darts, hooking them onto the curved atlatl mechanism, bringing it back orthogonal to their shoulder, and launching it slightly upwards using the flick of their wrists, as Griffin guided participants through the technique. 

Griffin’s atlatl technique is mostly based on trial and error, “building habits that develop and grow, slowly [getting] better.” The most memorable part of their technique involved a high kick during the release of the dart, which Griffin says helps them “move [their] body mass and momentum forward,” but admittedly is “sort of just a flourish.” 

While the popular term “atlatl” is Nahuatl in origin, Griffin explained that the tool itself was “used and produced independently all around the world,” such as the woomera, used by Indigenous Australians, and the oldest known form of atlatls, known as amentums, was found in southern France and dated to be 20,000 years old. The Nahuatl term is used, however, due to its specific style being the most popular today.

Atlatl usage was slowly replaced with bow and arrow usage as centuries went by, which, as Griffin explains, was in part due to evolution. “5, 6, 7-foot darts, you don’t really need them to hunt rabbits or even deer,” they said. “[Atlatls] were mostly used for mammoths or other megafauna that had thicker, larger pelts that you had to penetrate that a bow and arrow couldn’t. As creatures got smaller, you needed less penetration power with projectile hunting weapons.” 

However, some qualities of the atlatl mechanism prevented it from disappearing with the mammoths. During the Spanish invasion of the Americas, Incas and Aztecs fought with the atlatl mechanism, not bows and arrows, since “you had Spanish conquistadors showing up in metal armor that bows and arrows couldn’t really pierce very well, but a seven-foot dart can.”

These armor-piercing, mammoth-impaling darts are quite similar to the ones used today by Griffin along with their students during Paideia. The atlatls themselves, however, are wooden, instead of the traditional silver ones used by Incans. These darts and the atlatl tool can be purchased from one of two companies in the US: Atlatl Madness in New York and Thunderbird Atlatl in Missouri. 

While on the first day of “Atlatl Madness,” more people attended than Griffin expected, on the second day very few people showed up. While the darts were able to successfully impale the lawn even with the added ice layer, Griffin had to spend “a fair bit of time before the class trying to clear out the ice” to make a place to launch from, which “worked quite well.” 

Despite the unprecedented weather, Griffin has an overall positive outlook about their course and intends to do it again next year. “I’m all about trying to get more people interested in [atlatl],” said Griffin, who is “generally out on the rugby field usually once a week when the weather is nice” and “encourages people to come out and throw if you’re passing by and have free time.”