Social complexity and the bow in the Eastern Woodlands.

Bingham and Souza have presented an evolutionary theory that specifies a causal relationship between the advent of powerful projectile weapons such as the bow and radical rearrangements in social relations and histories. They propose that the acquisition of weapons that permitted humans to kill at ever-increasing distances provided the coercive means to suppress conflicts of interest among nonkin, self-interested individuals in social groups, thus paving the way for greater social complexity. An unprecedented reduction in projectile point size identifies the arrival of the bow ca.

Introduction: social complexity and the bow in the prehistoric North American record.

This Special Issue of Evolutionary Anthropology grew out of a symposium at the 2012 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting in Memphis, Tennessee (April 18-22). The goal of the symposium was to explore what we will argue is one of the most important and promising opportunities in the global archeological enterprise. In late prehistoric North America, the initial rise of cultures of strikingly enhanced complexity and the local introduction of a novel weapon technology, the bow, apparently correlate intimately in a diverse set of independent cases across the continent, as originally pointed out by Blitz.