Atlatl videos

I bought a fancy atlatl at the knap-in last weekend. I've made my own atlatls in the past. It's easy to carve a crude but functional one from a tree branch. In contrast, the one I bought, from Thunderbird Atlatls, is a minor work of art.

My new atlatl

If you're buying a making a spearthrower, the most important consideration is that it fits your hand easily so that your fingers can hold the dart shaft. If your hand is small or your fingers stubby, you should take extra care to ensure that you can use the instrument effectively. 

More importantly, I bought several darts, which are much harder to make than a spearthrower.

Atlatl darts

I took the spearthrower and the darts out for a test drive yesterday with one of my graduate students, Kelin Flanagan.

Here are four short videos of her shooting darts.

Kelin is a natural!

Unfortunately, the best video would not upload, perhaps because of the file size. [Update: I converted the largest file to mpg format, and it uploaded, but Blogger still messed up the resolution.] Also, note that the original videos are much higher resolution than these. I suspect the blogging website reduced the resolution to shrink the file size.