Weapons without metal: Far from primitive!

without a doubt swords and other metal weapons have attracted a lot of attention but throughout human history there have been plenty of weapons that were made without any kind of metal whatsoever and that was still highly effective so I figured it would be interesting to show you some examples of weapons that don't require metal to get the job done typically when people think of wooden clubs they have the idea of some stereotypical primitive caveman thing which is basically just a tapered branch however there is a wide variety of intricately designed wooden war clubs that can be quite impressive for their craftsmanship and design war clubs from Polynesia Melanesia Australia South America and many other places are quite often elaborately ornamented and very skillfully shaped sometimes you see round ball shapes at the end other times you see a somewhat paddle like flared out piece at the end it's just to give it a bit more heft at the end so it has more impact one of the most striking examples is this war club from the Fiji's as you can see it is kind of paddle like and has a spatula shaped blade even though this is just from one perspective if you look closely you can actually approximately see how thin it gets towards the edges so this is pretty much like a wooden blade it is actually tapered towards the edges and finally ground and polished and you can imagine such a narrow surface definitely amplifies the force from a swing maybe you think that wood would be an ineffective material for a weapon like this but you have to keep in mind that in many regions which these indigenous weapons are from you have a variety of dense and heavy hardwoods like Ironwood for example makes for a very good Club cocobolo a beanie and a variety of other exotic hardwoods that have very suitable properties for a weapon here's an example from the indigenous Maori of New Zealand it may look like a spear at first glance because of the point but apparently this was a fighting staff it's usually between 1.5 and 1.8 metres long and it can be used for stabbing because of the point but it's also made for parrying and striking the a fluffy collar that you see there is made of bird feathers and hair from a type of Polynesian dog and its purpose was supposedly to distract the opponent during fight which I'm a bit skeptical about I cannot really imagine an experienced fighter being distracted by something like that it's the same idea that you have in some Chinese weapons which have tassels and such but I don't really think they would distract that much you as an experienced fighter you know what to focus on but of course it is also for decoration so just ornament and to more Maori weapons here is a wooden axe again despite being made of nothing but wood this is definitely a functional weapon it has some of the same advantages as the metal axe it has the 90 degree angle head with which you can hook an opponent's weapon or limbs and which lends itself to very powerful strikes this one even has a tapered point at the end so you could thrust with that this warrior also holds a small Club which is made of green stone or dark stone and this is again very interesting as you can see it's quite a compact Club it's also thinner than you might think when you look at it from the front but you can imagine if you have a polished Club like that made of solid stone which is even slightly tapered towards the edges that would definitely cause significant damage they also usually have lanyard holes which are definitely practical there are also examples where you help a club with wooden core and a stone attached to it like in this case this is one of the largest examples as far as the stone is concerned it is about 22 centimeters or 9 inches in diameter so that's quite a hefty thing and it's held in place with woven bamboo strips if you were to underestimate these weapons just because they are made of wood you would be in for a nasty surprise they can't even cut to an extent if you have a weapon made of very dense hardwood which is actually smoothly polished into an edge this can still give you a mean cut not as deep as a steel blade obviously but it's definitely not to be trifled with I would absolutely love to do testing with such weapon but I just don't know where to get my quality replicas from and I wouldn't really want to use an antique original and risk messing it up but anyway if you want a dedicated cutting weapon there are also options even without metal like this relatively famous Aztec weapon I'm not going to try to pronounce it just like I avoided trying to pronounce any of the other names I just have no clue how to do it so I would just butcher the pronunciation and we really don't need that do we the interesting thing about obsidian blades is that they can actually be sharper than anything else on the planet the reason for that is the material and how they are made obsidian is very hard and in fact brittle you don't make those blades by grinding them you actually chip them off you have to strike the material in the right spot in the right angle with the appropriate amount of force trust me I tried flint knapping for a while and I have since giving it up because I just don't have the time and dedication to put into it it is really complex a difficult craft you can't just pick up some rocks and bash them together it's not how it works it really requires a lot of practice and knowledge and skill what makes them so sharp is that they basically break into microscopically thin feather edges so it's finer than anything else you could achieve with metal the only problem is they are not very durable the conventional obsidian is very brittle you can actually compare it to glass in many ways it is also often called volcanic glass so the sharpness deteriorates pretty quickly but the first strike is basically like a hyper fine razor blade with use of course the blades could separate from the core or the wooden core itself might break or leave the blades my chatter so durability is definitely an issue with this but it is nevertheless a very effective weapon and it is a lot easier and quicker to make then say a steel sword which requires a lot of patience tons of working hours and in order to repair it you need an expert whereas something like this can more easily be repaired by the Warriors themselves there is actually also a pretty similar example for Neolithic and early Bronze Age Europe and people have sometimes mistaken this for being a broken sword but really it isn't what the craftsmen intended was to emulate some of the upcoming metal blades and make a flint version of them they were unable to make a full-length sort blade out of flint for one that would simply have been too brittle and the other problem is also because of the way you make them you would need to chip off an extremely long flake so you would need one hell of a large stone core for that you simply losing a lot of material in the making because in order to shape it you have to keep knocking off chips of stone but what they did instead was they made those blades and attach them to a wooden core so same principle as with the Aztec weapon archeologists have found some complete flint daggers though which were found in Denmark and luckily I've actually had an opportunity to handle one of those while I started a couple of semesters in archaeology and I was really impressed with those things especially since I was trying flint knapping at the time and kind of failing miserably because it's so difficult but I was really impressed with the sophisticated craftsmanship very finely made it's really astonishing to see and especially hold because those are of course mostly impervious to the elements so they are still in pretty much pristine condition although I have a suspicion that they probably wrapped leather straps or other organic material around the grips to make them a little more comfortable but that of course wouldn't be preserved so yeah personally I have a lot of respect for these kinds of weapons it's definitely not what you could call primitive by any stretch although on the one hand it is kind of depressing to see how dedicated humans have been to come up with all kinds of ways to tear each other to shreds on the other hand you can't help but admire the ingenuity and creativity that went into these weapon designs and it's definitely fascinating to see these historical artifacts well hopefully you found this interesting if you did let me know then I might make more videos about this there's of course a ton of material to cover there are actually quite a few metal weapons and I could make more videos about this so let me know and thanks for watching

Channel: Skallagrim

Views: 2,574,596

Keywords: Weapon (Interest), Weapons, without, metal, metal-less, indigenous, designs, war, clubs, axes, swords, knives, daggers, flint, dagger, knapping, flintknapping, obsidian, blades, stone, hardwood, ironwood, macuahuitl, Aztec (Ethnicity), Maori, Oceania, Melanesia (Region), Polynesia (Region), pacific, islanders, islands, fiji, warriors, tribe, tribal, wood, wooden, shark, teeth, spear, effective, fighting, exotic, Anthropology (Field Of Study), cultural, Cultural Anthropology (Field Of Study), History, Archaeology (Interest)

Id: 2C6_pSEPbO8

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 05 2014