American Blowguns (and Southeast Asian Ones)
I was in Cambridge last week to give a talk at a conference at King’s College. My paper was on the ‘Hemispheric Middle Ages’, a concept I first outlined some years ago on this blog and later applied in my doctoral dissertation. (Well, I probably first outlined the idea on Twitter back in 2017 or so, but I wrote the first piece on it on here in 2018.) The ‘Hemispheric Middle Ages’ is based on the idea that the world was divided into two non-interacting hemispheres or supercontinents — the Americas on the one hand and greater Afro-Eurasia on the other — before 1492, when the hemispheres came together in the wake of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Caribbean. The post-1492 coming-together-of-the-hemispheres, a process usually known as the Columbian exchange, was catastrophic for indigenous American people and transformative for the planet at large. We cannot speak of truly ‘global’ history before 1492/3 because the planet was united only geologically and meteorologically and not politically, culturally, or economically. Instead of speaking of the ‘Global Middle Ages’, we should treat (medieval) Afro-Eurasia as one space and the Americas as another.
The purpose of my talk was to outline the idea of a hemispheric approach to Afro-Eurasia before the Columbian exchange and to point out some commonalities across Afro-Eurasia before the end of the fifteenth century — phenomena like steel, onions, and cattle, things that could be encountered in Africa, Asia, and Europe before the hemispheres came together and which served to unite Afro-Eurasia as a single place distinct from the Americas. I gave a similar talk at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo last year (2022) and the audience there was very enthusiastic. I was the last speaker of the Cambridge conference so the audience for my talk was fairly small, but again the idea was received positively.
The audience was small, as I say, but one person who did attend was the linguist Roger Blench. Blench is now a rather old man, and it seems to me that, sadly, he jumped off the deep end into pseudoscientific crackpottery some time ago, embracing hyperdiffusionist ideas in particular. At the end of the talk Blench asserted that there were connections between Eurasia and the Americas before Columbus — but also that Africa was cut off from most of the developments that I had cited. The idea of separate hemispheres was thus ludicrous, as was the idea of Afro-Eurasia as a cohesive entity (in spite of the fact that Africa, Asia, and Europe comprise a single landmass). Blench’s examples of supposed Eurasia-America connections included the introduction of the blowgun and the backstrap loom from Southeast Asia to the Americas and the introduction of the composite bow from Central Asia to British Columbia. The latter was, apparently, enthusiastically taken up by speakers of Athabaskan or Dené languages at some point during the period of the Mongol empire, allowing them to ‘transform’ North America.
Blench made these assertions as if they were indisputable fact. In truth, there is no good evidence for any of these claims and none is accepted by historians or archaeologists. (There might be a link between Asian horn-wood-sinew composite bows and the sinew-back wooden bows used by Eskaleut-speaking peoples in North America, but this is speculation rather than solid fact, and Dené speakers’ bows are usually very different from both. In any case…)
In this post I’d like to address the question of the independent invention of the blowgun in Southeast Asia and the Americas specifically. It is an interesting subject in its own right, but it should also give you an idea of the general problems with Blench’s claims, which all represent the same sort of diffusionist position.
Blowguns
The blowgun or blowpipe is a weapon used in both hunting and war comprising a long tube through which a dart or pellet is propelled by the force of the breath. Blowgun tubes are usually made of organic materials like bamboo or wood, but historically blowguns have been made of metal as well, and it is even possible to manufacture a decent if not particularly durable one from paper. (You should not do this unless you live in a jurisdiction in which ownership or use of a blowgun is not against the law. Check local statutes.)
Before 1492, blowguns could be found across tropical Asia and even into Europe. The oldest image of a blowgun in an Afro-Eurasian context is probably the one that appears in an andesite bas-relief on the temple of Borobudur in Central Java, which was built in the middle of the ninth century (Figure 1). Blowguns start to appear in western Afro-Eurasian texts in the tenth century AD/CE as exotic weapons used by pirates in Southeast Asia, first in al-Masʿūdī’s Murūj al-Dhahab (947 AD/CE) and later in Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio de mirabilibus Orientalium Tartarorum (c.1330). In the fifteenth century blowguns begin to appear in European illustrations and so must have been in reasonably common use by then.
There is little question that the blowgun was invented in Southeast Asia, probably among Malayo-Polynesian-speaking people somewhere in the vicinity of the island of Borneo a few thousand years ago. A word for ‘blowgun’, *sumpit, can be reconstructed to proto-Malayo-Polynesian, and a Malay variant of this word, sumpitan, ended up spreading as far away as Europe in the Middle Ages, undergoing significant changes as it passed through Tamil and Arabic (whence French sarbacane and Portuguese zarabatana). Words for blowguns, some related to sumpitan and some from other sources, can be found in quite a few early Southeast Asian texts, including the Old Sundanese Sanghyang Siksakandang Karesian (earliest MS dated 1518 but the text is probably quite a bit older — Figure 2) and Bujangga Manik (probably written in the 1470s).
Blowguns were also used in the Americas. They are mentioned in some early descriptions of various parts of the American tropics and appear frequently in ethnographies of societies in Amazonia. Significantly, blowguns also appear in pre-Columbian art from the Maya-speaking parts of North America. In Maya culture, the implement is implicated in the story of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, in the Popol Vuh (or Popul Wuj), a tale known principally from a K’iche’ version recorded in post-contact times. Parts of the Popol Vuh are depicted in reliefs at a range of Classic-era (c.250–900 AD/CE) Maya sites and in paintings on Classic-era ceramics, and blowguns appear prominently in some of these images (Figure 3). The earliest images of blowguns in the Americas are probably older than the earliest images of blowguns in Southeast Asia, if only by a few centuries.
Is There a Link?
Blowguns were thus used in the Americas and in Afro-Eurasia before 1492. So: is there a link between the Southeast Asian and American blowguns?
No, I don’t think so.
First, it seems prima facie unlikely that there would be a link between the two types of blowgun. There were no other connections between Mesoamerica and Southeast Asia before Columbus. No other technologies, ideas, or foodstuffs appear to have been shared between the two regions. There is no maize in pre-Columbian Borneo and no rice in pre-Columbian Yucatan.
The only reason to propose a connection between Southeast Asian and American blowguns is that the weapons resemble one another. The resemblance presents no difficulties if you can accept the possibility that people in different places can come up with the same idea independently. In the absence of other evidence for Southeast Asia-Mesoamerica links, I’m happy to accept that the blowgun was invented twice; it isn’t such a complex idea, and when one lives in a tropical forest it is undeniably useful to have an accurate weapon for shooting small game high in the canopy. It seems a particularly intuitive invention in parts of the world with abundant bamboo, whose culms form natural tubes, often with openings of the right diameter for a blowgun. (There are incidentally 400+ bamboo species native to the American tropics.)
I’m satisfied by this line of reasoning. If the blowgun had been introduced to the Americas, other things would have been introduced alongside it. As there is no evidence of this, I’d say that we can discount the idea of influence without going into much detail about it. But there is more to say.
Polynesians?
The Americas were visited by Austronesian-speaking people before 1492. The people who settled eastern Polynesia (Hawai’i, Rapa Nui, Tahiti, etc. — Figure 4), whose ancestors had come out of island Southeast Asia a couple of thousand years earlier, appear to have travelled to South America at some point around the end of the first millennium AD/CE. This is evidenced by the presence of sweet potatoes, which were domesticated in South America, at archaeological sites in eastern Polynesia radiocarbon-dated to c.1000 AD/CE (in the Cook Islands). The word for ‘sweet potato’ in Polynesian languages (e.g. Maori kūmara) is also thought to have come from a Quechua word, kumar. Additionally, some indigenous American people, particularly in Colombia and other parts of western South America, share some genes with Polynesians. This gene transfer is dated to around 800 years ago or so, consistent with the sweet potato evidence. All of this suggests that Polynesian people had some contacts with people on the South American mainland about a thousand years ago and that this contact involved sexual intercourse and the sharing of crops and words.
The people who settled Polynesia spoke Austronesian languages related to those spoken in Southeast Asia. Their proto-Malayo-Polynesian-speaking ancestors almost certainly knew of and used blowguns. Is it possible that the blowgun was introduced to the Americas by Polynesians?
Again, the answer must be no. There are two main reasons for this.
For a start, Polynesian people don’t actually appear to have used blowguns. As they went east, the people who settled Polynesia ditched several technologies which had been important to their ancestors. Their antecedents had made beautiful and fascinating ceramics, but this practice was given up early on in the settlement of Polynesia. The weaving of cotton cloth was abandoned in favour of making cloth from the bark of the paper mulberry tree (Broussonetia papyrifera), a tradition that went all the way back to the earliest speakers of proto-Austronesian and which had long co-existed with cotton weaving elsewhere in the Austronesian-speaking world. (In Indonesia, B. papyrifera bark was used to make manuscripts, including the very oldest surviving Malay manuscript, which dates to the fourteenth century AD/CE.)
The blowgun appears to have been given up as well. People in Polynesia used bows with unfletched cane arrows for small-game hunting; for war, they used hardwood javelins and war clubs. Blowguns don’t feature in ethnographies or oral histories from Hawai’i, Tahiti, or elsewhere in Polynesia.
More importantly, the chronology doesn’t work. The current evidence shows that Polynesian people arrived in South America about a thousand years ago. As noted above, there are images of blowguns on Maya ceramics and in Maya reliefs made and carved several centuries prior to this. Even if we assume that Polynesian people did use blowguns — a notion for which there is little direct evidence — the people they met in the Americas would already have known what a blowgun was before they got there. The Polynesians would not have been introducing the blowgun to the Americas, any more than they would have been introducing the bow or the javelin.
No Other Evidence
As there is no other evidence of Austronesian-American contacts aside from these millennium-old Polynesian-South American encounters, there is no reason to connect American blowguns with Southeast Asian ones. The only way to continue to support a link between the two weapons is to suppose that there was an earlier and entirely unevidenced movement from Southeast Asia to the Americas before the Polynesian expansion, a movement that managed to bypass all the islands of the Pacific east of Micronesia, left no traces in the archaeological record, and led to the introduction of the blowgun and backstrap loom in Mesoamerica but not rice, taro, yams, bananas, coconut, or outrigger canoes. I’d say that that would be a crackpot proposal, on par with assuming the existence of Atlantis or Lemuria or the influence of extraterrestrials.
No African Blowguns
Of course, it was not possible to go through all the evidence in response to a question at a conference, even at the very end, but I said to Blench that there was no reason to connect the two weapons and that they were almost certainly invented independently. He then asked why blowguns had not been invented independently in tropical Africa, which seems something of a non-sequitur to me but is worth addressing here anyway. Blowguns do not feature in ethnographies or ethnohistoric accounts of Africa’s tropical forests and the weapon seems to have been largely absent from the continent. I suppose Blench thought that this absence demonstrated the impossibility of independent invention; if it had happened twice, why didn’t it happen three times?
It seems to me that the African question is still a question even if one supposes that the blowgun was introduced everywhere by Austronesian speakers. We know for a fact that Austronesian-speaking people from Southeast Asia visited and settled in Africa in the first millennium AD/CE, bringing with them Asian rice, Asian yams, and bananas, as well as some loanwords and important technologies (like the outrigger canoe). Many of these people appear to have come from the island of Borneo, where blowguns have historically been popular and where blowguns may even have been invented. (The closest relatives of the Malagasy language, spoken on the African island of Madagascar, are to be found in Borneo.) A (hyper)diffusionist perspective does not rid us of the question. We can phrase it slightly differently: Why didn’t people in Africa adopt the blowgun from Southeast Asian settlers?
One can come up with some answers for the no-blowguns-in-Africa question, chief among which might be that tropical forest cover is proportionally much smaller in Africa than in Amazonia, the Yucatan, or Borneo and that many African animals encountered while hunting are much larger (elephant, hippo, rhino, Cape buffalo, lion, etc.) than in those areas and much less likely to be injured by a blowgun dart, even a poisoned one. But this question is fundamentally irrelevant to that of American blowguns. There is no way to make the chronology work to establish a connection between blowguns in the Americas and blowguns in Southeast Asia (and elsewhere in Afro-Eurasia) before the Columbian exchange. Independent invention is the only reasonable possibility here. And the same applies to the backstrap loom and to the other things Blench mentioned.
So, to sum up:
1) Blowguns were used in both Afro-Eurasia and the Americas before 1492, with use of the weapon spreading across Afro-Eurasia out of island Southeast Asia in the centuries before Columbus’s first voyage. But:
2) There were no direct links between Southeast Asia and the Americas before the end of the fifteenth century.
3a) The only movement of people linking Southeast Asia with the Americas is the expansion of Austronesian speakers into Polynesia; there is some evidence to suggest that these Polynesian people visited South America about a thousand years ago. But:
3b) Polynesians cannot have introduced the blowgun to the Americas because they didn’t use blowguns even though their ancestors had. And:
3c) Blowguns were already demonstrably in use in Mesoamerica before Polynesians arrived in the Americas.
4) As there is no other evidence of links between the two regions, the blowgun must have been invented independently in Southeast Asia and the Americas.
There may well be some problems with the ‘Hemispheric Middle Ages’ framework, but the American blowgun is not one of them.
A. J. West — Lisbon, November 2023.
The conference in Cambridge was my last ever; I have not signed up for any more conferences and have no plans to attend any in the future. This blog is also (theoretically) defunct. However, I’ve come to realise that a lot of people assume that there must be a connection between the blowguns used in South America and those used in Southeast Asia, and I thought it would be wise to address that in writing. I couldn’t think of a better place to do that than here.
