I am looking for evidences of the use of Ilex aquifolium wood for making arrow shafts during Bronze Age.
I have asked E. Castglioni and M. Cottini, both of them are working in Longobard necropolis with mineralised materials.
María, many years ago I processed as student every literary mention at that time accessible about wood use in central Europe prehistory (it is my unpublished thesis in archaeology from 1984). I thing some objects are made from Ilex wood, but I have to check it. I am in field this month...you can send me email at [email protected] I beginning of October I will be back in my office and I can send you reference.
@ Maria,
When a youngster, I used to make arrowshafts out of numerous plants, but it never occurred to me to try using holly, although it is ubiquitous in the woods in eastern Texas where I grew-up (and, too, people commonly plant it as hedges around their yards/homes because it's a beautiful ornamental evergreen). I suppose I didn't think about using the holly for shafts because there were so many other plants, close at hand, that were easier to use and made better arrows. However, we DID use the fruits (we called them Holly berries) as ammunition for our blow-guns. Using a glass-tube of about 8mm-diameter and 1.5m in length, you could take a mouthful of the "berries" and shoot them rapidly from the blow-pipe (almost in a continuous barrage, virtually like a machine-gun) with enough force to stun birds. Groups of us pre-teen boys used to have play "wars" with these blow-pipes and Holly berries, and I can still remember the sharp sting when you'd get hit by a berry (and the mosquito-bite-like welts that would be raised ... especially if the berries were fully ripe with the large central seed already hardened), at quite a distance. I can't believe there's any place on Earth with such a dearth of better plants available from which to make arrowshafts that the Holly would be used.
Regards,
Bob Skiles
PS - at the age of 6-years, my native-American [Cherokee] grand-mother showed me a range of plants suitable for use in making arrows ... Holly was not one of them ... so I'm not entirely certain my bias against Holly (actually, bias in favor of other plants) wasn't cultural conditioning/training from that early imprinting of what plants were suitable as arrowshafts, and this, perhaps, subconsciously caused me to disregard the possibilty of using Holly (or MAYBE I subconsciously knew that the little-old-ladies whose holly bushes we raided for the berries/ammo would scream even louder at us if we were caught breaking limbs from their yard-plants and hedges for making arrows) *hee*hee*
PPS - I am not quite as old as the Bronze Age (well, almost) but none of the dart-shafts found preserved in Texas cave deposits (which ARE as old as the European Bronze Age) have been made of holly wood.... nor, am I aware of any Native American culture that ever used holly for arrow shafts.
I know this may not be particularly helpful but when faced with a question of the use of materials for a particular purpose my first port of call is usually to look at the physical properties of said material. This is the result of long experience which has lead me to conclude that if it is possible someone somewhere probably was desperate enough to use it. A possible function for any reasonably hard wood is as a tip for a composite shaft although I don't know whether that would fit your question. Another possible line of inquiry would be to look at the folklore associated with holly and compare it with the folklore associated with woods that we do know were used. OK I know it is questionable how far back we can usefully use folklore to model activities but the protective qualities of holly in British folklore especially wrt warding off witches would suggest to me that it may have had some form of practical weapon based function, although again not necessarily arrow shafts.
Hi Maria, I certainly never heard about the use of Ilex for making arrows. I had a look through the section on the Bronze Age in Jürgen Junkmanns ‘Pfeil und Bogen. Von der Altsteinzeit bis zum Mittelalter’ (Bow and Arrow. From the palaeolithic up to the Middle Ages. Ludwigshafen, Angelika Hörning. 2013, ISBN 978-3-938921-27-2) and there only arrows made of Viburnum and Larix are mentioned. For the Neolithic north of the Alps arrows are regularly made of Viburnum or Cornus, with some Fraxinus, Lonicera and Corylus, as well as some odd other woods, but never Ilex.
All the best,
Rengert
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