Weapons of Maths Instruction: A Thousand Years of Technological Stasis in Arrowheads from the South Scandinavian Middle Mesolithic

This paper presents some results from my doctoral research into the evolution of bow-arrow technology using archaeological data from the south Scandinavian Mesolithic (Edinborough 2004). A quantitative approach is used to describe the morphological variation found in samples taken from over 3600 armatures from nine Danish and Swedish lithic assemblages. A linked series of statistical techniques determines the two most significant metric variables across the nine arrowhead assemblages in terms of the cultural transmission of arrowhead technology. The resultant scatterplot uses confidence ellipses to reveal highly distinctive patterns of morphological variation that are related to population-specific technological traditions. A population-level hypothesis of a socially constrained transmission mechanism is presented that may explain the unusually long period of technological stasis demonstrated by six of the nine arrowhead phase-assemblages.