Identification des impacts de projectiles sur le squelette des grands ongulés

Getting to the point: An experimental approach to improving the identification of penetrating projectile trauma to bone caused by medieval arrows

“…However, for the purposes of this study, it is the morphology of the bony lesions resulting from projectile impacts that are of. Recent years have seen several experiments focusing on the marks made on bone by prehistoric projectiles from bows and spearthrowers, with arrowheads made of stone (Castel, 2008;O'Driscoll and Thompson, 2014;Smith et al, 2007;Yeshurun and Yaroshevich, 2014), antler (Letourneux and Pétillon, 2008), and composite materials (Pétillon et al, 2011). Although these mostly focus on a prehistoric, zooarchaeological perspective, there are no similar studies on medieval projectile impacts, and so these experiments provide the only available comparable experimental data for the present article.…”

“…A comparison of the above experiments reveals a lack of consensus about how to describe and classify the injuries, which has led to many different terms and categories being used by different authors. Some of the terms used to describe the damage are notches (Letourneux and Pétillon, 2008;Pétillon et al, 2011;Yeshurun and Yaroshevich, 2014), striations (Yeshurun and Yaroshevich, 2014), cuts, crushing (Castel, 2008;Pétillon et al, 2011) scraping, splitting, dislocation (Castel, 2008), punctures and perforations (Castel, 2008;Letourneux and Pétillon, 2008;Pétillon et al, 2011), "penetration holes" (Yeshurun and Yaroshevich, 2014) or "full thickness punctures" (Smith et al, 2007), cracking (Castel, 2008;Letourneux and Pétillon, 2008) and embedded (or implantation of) a point or point fragments (Castel, 2008;Letourneux and Pétillon, 2008;Smith et al, 2007). Smith et al (2007) also observed internal bevelling on some of the experimentally produced defects, a type of damage characteristic of cranial entrance wounds from gunshots, where a projectile impact results in a defect that is larger internally than externally (Berryman and Symes, 1998;İşcan, 1998, 1999).…”

Stone tools for the hunt: points with impact scars from a Middle Paleolithic site in southern Italy

“…A systematic study of projectile marks on bone, based on more than 300 stone point impacts on ungulate carcasses by the research program led by Geneste andPlisson between 1987 and2000, has shown that most impacted bones preserve only very small portion of flint fragments that can easily be dislodged during fossilization, partly explaining the rarity of these observations (Castel, 2008).…”

The Still Bay points of Blombos Cave (South Africa)

“…The aim of this research group (Geneste and Plisson, 1990;Castel, 2008) was the study of the functional technology of Solutrean points based on replication and use of shouldered and unifacial points, hafted and mounted as darts on spear shafts weighing 202 g and 1.5 m long or as arrowheads on wooden arrows 80 cm long. The flint points were shot in three different ways: with spear throwers similar to the Upper Paleolithic ones, with a calibrated cross-bow with 25 kg of pull or with a long bow made of yew with about 22 kg of force.…”