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Record W4417423990 · doi:10.1007/s10816-025-09756-y

Bow and Arrow Technology in North America

2025· article· en· W4417423990 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Archaeological Method and Theory · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillSimon Fraser UniversityEast Carolina University
KeywordsArrowCraftInvestment (military)PopulationCultural transmission in animalsTransmission (telecommunications)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract The adoption and spread of bow and arrow technology in North America reflect a complex interplay of ecological and social factors: While environmental variables such as wood availability and prey diversity/behavior were surely important, demographic and cultural variables—including population size, density, and connectivity; cultural transmission processes; and social dynamics—were equally or more influential. Parsing the relative effects of these factors and understanding interactions among them requires a clear view of the timing and nature of bow use across North America’s diverse geography. This paper makes two primary contributions to our understanding of the bow’s adoption in North America. Firstly, we present evidence for the bow’s earliest appearance, use in conjunction with other projectile technologies, and effects on economic and other systems in the North American Arctic, Pacific Northwest and Plateau, California and the Great Basin, Southwest, and Southeast. Secondly, we present a novel model of technological investment (uptake) that considers the effects of transmission agents’ social roles: Whether agents are craft specialists or do-it-yourself tool producers–users affects rates of adoption, a finding with global implications demonstrated here through regional case studies. We conclude that adoption depends not just on the bow’s inherent utility but on how tools are produced, shared, used, and valued in different economic systems.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.315
Threshold uncertainty score0.948

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.331
Teacher spread0.315 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it