John C Whittaker
Biographic Data
| ID | 98164 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John C Whittaker |
| GIVEN NAMES | John C |
| FAMILY NAME | Whittaker |
| SIGNATURE | WHITTAKER J C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Grinnell College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3529-2379 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 285 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1967 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Ballistic potential of the atlatl and dart for hunting late-Quaternary megafauna
Testing and reconsidering atlatl dart ballistics
The atlatl and dart weapon is characterized by variability in form and application. • Heavier darts carry less velocity but substantially more energy, predicted by the force-velocity relationship in throwing. • Atlatlist height and weight tends to correlate with greater dart energy and velocity. • Both sex and experience impact kinetic energy but are overridden by variability between individuals. • Research that stereotypes weapons and overlooks …
Investigating morphological and functional variability and frequency in Lucayan bipolar microliths from the central Bahamas
“Here come the anthropos”
Pour une publication sur Épisciences. Whittaker John, 1997, “Here Come the Anthros. What Good is an Archaeologist?” in Andelson Jon (dir.), Anthropology Matters: Essays in Honor of Ralph A. Luebben, Grinnell College, Grinnell, p. 101-108. Starting with a song denouncing anthropologists and prehistorians as disrespectful of the cultures they study, the article reflects on the relationship between lost cultures and their scientific study, drawing o…
Training Ethnoarchaeologists and Experimental Archaeologists
Nineteenth Century Gunflints from the Nepalese Armory
Sources of obsidian for the Sinagua of Northern Arizona (USA)
Atlatl Dart Velocity
Thrusting spears, hand-thrown javelins, and atlatls are all suggested as weapons used by Paleo hunters to bring down Pleistocene megafauna. Before we can distinguish between weapons in archaeological contexts, or compare their effects, we need accurate measurements of performance characteristics. Velocity directly influences momentum and kinetic energy and thus the damage a projectile can do, but accurate measurements of atlatl dart velocity are …
The Night Is Different
Hunting Caribou
Levers, Not Springs
Flint from the Ancestors
The Magician of Ridge Ruin
Stone tools and the perishable artifacts of which they are often components can be used to express complex social and ritual messages. A detailed analysis of projectile points, arrow shafts, and painted miniature bows from the burial of the so-called "Magician" of Ridge Ruin demonstrates the power of specific burial analyses to reconstruct the ritual and social context of a funeral ceremony. The Magician, an adult Sinagua male buried with ceremon…
Arrowheads, folklore, and documentary sources
Documentary sources, even some that appear to be eyewitness accounts of events and processes of interest to archaeologists, must be carefully evaluated. Some are infected by the folklore of the time, and some of this folklore has thus crept into archaeological “knowledge.” Our analysis of arrows and projectile points represents one example where traditional understandings derived from ethnographic sources and contemporary documents should be ques…
Ethnoarchaeology
Fire-and-Water Knapping
Anthropology is not immune to the processes of folklore, and some “old wives' tales” have surprising endurance, especially in popular culture. The belief that arrowheads were made by dripping cold water on heated stone is a good example. Searching early references shows that this story probably originated in the early years of the last century and was popularized by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but its ultimate origins are obscure. The enduring populari…
The Aztec Atlatl in the British Museum
The British Museum's Aztec atlatl is one of their most famous Mesoamerican objects, yet it has not been studied as a weapon in light of current knowledge of spear-throwers, and the details necessary to do so have not been published. Close examination and experimental replication shows that although it is ornately decorated, it is a serviceable spear-thrower. While evidence of actual use of this specimen is ambiguous, we can at least accept the fo…
How Atlatl Darts Behave
Beveled retouch on stone projectile points has often been considered as a device to spin and stabilize a projectile. A recent paper showed that a beveled point will spin a small shaft under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. However, this experiment has little relevance for real projectiles such as atlatl darts, which flex dramatically and spin unevenly inflight, quite independent of point form. The spinning is related to the flexibility o…
Comparing Atlatls and Bows
It is difficult to compare two different technologies that serve similar purposes, especially when the skills of experimenters must also be considered. I conducted experiments to show that bows should be more consistent and accurate than atlatls, and that proficiency with a bow is more easily attained. However, competition between weapon systems and the choice of one over the other in any real world situation is far more complex than such general…
Ambiguous Endurance
It has been suggested that the atlatl, the weapon associated with Basketmaker and Archaic cultures in the Southwest until the advent of the bow and arrow, survived alongside the bow into late Pueblo times. This is not simply a matter of technological chronology, since it raises issues of recognizing complex artifacts in the fragmentary archaeological record, and affects interpretations of subsistence, warfare, symbolism, ethnicity and cultural co…
Cushing's Key Marco Atlatls
Two forms of prehistoric atlatl or spear thrower were recovered from a Florida swamp in 1895 by Frank Hamilton Cushing. Modern research on spear throwers requires a more useful detailed description of these artifacts, and leads to attempts to replicate and test them. In this case, replicative experiments provide some subjective evaluations of the atlatls, and several possible interpretive directions. As in many replicative experiments, physical t…
ÇAkmak Revisited
Flintknappers from the village of Çakmak in western Turkey made flint blades for threshing sledges until the early 1980s. Former knappers are still able to provide a description of mining, knapping, and distribution, consistent with information collected by previous archaeologists. Informants agree that the mines provided an excellent living but, compared to a similar village industry making gunflints at Brandon, England, there is little local or…
A Sinagua Acropolis
New Caves is a late Northern Sinagua site on the slope and top of a large cinder cone at O’Neill Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona. Mapping the whole site and excavating selected rooms allows us to interpret the architecture in terms of adaptations to the time and circumstances of late Sinagua life and to the peculiar conditions on O’Neill Crater. New Caves shows features suggesting use as a defensive citadel, terraces and other features allowing us…
Lithic Industry in a Maya Center
Cahal Tok (Place of Flint) is a limestone rise with some structural evidence, associated with the previously designated LDF Chert Site, close to the ceremonial center of El Pilar. Excavations uncovered evidence that during the Late Classic period, specialized flintknappers produced bifaces, primarily chert axes, at the Cahol Tok locus, first on a cleared limestone shelf then on a prepared cobble platform. Small flakes remained in situ whereas muc…
Handaxes Still Don't Fly
New experimental evidence on the relation between percussion flaking and flake variation
Evaluating consistency in typology and classification
Comparing Atlatls and Bows
It is difficult to compare two different technologies that serve similar purposes, especially when the skills of experimenters must also be considered. I conducted experiments to show that bows should be more consistent and accurate than atlatls, and that proficiency with a bow is more easily attained. However, competition between weapon systems and the choice of one over the other in any real world situation is far more complex than such general…
Handaxe-Hurling Hominids
Individual Variation as an Approach to Economic Organization
The ability to trace the products of individuals in the archaeological record can enhance our knowledge of economic and social structures. Ethnological and experimental information combined with archaeological data is necessary to study individual stylistic variation. Projectile point sets from burials at Grasshopper Pueblo in Arizona were examined using dimensional attributes and also attributes describing patterns of flake-scar orientation. Poi…
Primitive Weapons and Modern Sport
Even uncontrolled “experimentation” such as sporting use of early hunting gear can provide insights into archaeological questions. Analyzing the records of a standardized atlatl competition over eight years offers some insights into spear thrower capabilities, learning curves, and the use of weapons by women and children. The sample is now large enough to provide a plausible analog to prehistoric atlat capabilities, allowing us to judge ethnograp…
Lithic Industry in a Maya Center
Cahal Tok (Place of Flint) is a limestone rise with some structural evidence, associated with the previously designated LDF Chert Site, close to the ceremonial center of El Pilar. Excavations uncovered evidence that during the Late Classic period, specialized flintknappers produced bifaces, primarily chert axes, at the Cahol Tok locus, first on a cleared limestone shelf then on a prepared cobble platform. Small flakes remained in situ whereas muc…
How Atlatl Darts Behave
Beveled retouch on stone projectile points has often been considered as a device to spin and stabilize a projectile. A recent paper showed that a beveled point will spin a small shaft under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. However, this experiment has little relevance for real projectiles such as atlatl darts, which flex dramatically and spin unevenly inflight, quite independent of point form. The spinning is related to the flexibility o…
The Palaeolithic and Mesolithic of Albania
In the Balkans archaeologists until recently have neglected Pleistocene and early Holocene remains in open-air contexts in favor of excavations in caves. As a consequence, they have reconstructed patterns of settlement and land use that in many areas are misleading. The authors of this paper suggest that a systematic examination of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic open-air sites through intensive surface survey has the potential to transform entirely …
Handaxes Still Don't Fly
Replicas, Fakes, and Art
In addition to archaeologists who make stone tools for experimental purposes, there is a growing number of flintknappers who make lithic artifacts for fun and for profit. The scale of non-academic knapping is little known to archaeologists, and is connected to a flourishing market for antiquities, fakes, replicas, and modern lithic art. Modern stone tools are being produced in vast numbers, and are inevitably muddling the prehistoric record. Mode…
Alonia and Dhoukanes
An ancient feature of Mediteranean agriculture was the threshing floor, used with flint-toothed sledges. Information about Cypriot threshing and details of some threshing floors reveal both variation and common features that reflect functional, social, and economic contexts
A Consideration of Observational Error in Lithic Use Wear Analysis
(1982). A Consideration of Observational Error in Lithic Use Wear Analysis. Lithic Technology: Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 59-63
Moses Atticizing
Hunting Caribou
A Ritual Spindle Whorl Deposit from the Late Classic Maya Site of E1 Pilar, Belize
Excavations near the ceremonial precinct of El Pilar, an important Maya center in Belize, exposed a Late Classic period concentration of almost 200 broken limestone spindle whorls. A program of experimentation demonstrated that the whorls were purposely destroyed, possibly as part of a ritual event or events. Such rituals may have been part of a strategy to enhance the status of spinners by honoring deities associated with spinning
The Oldest British Industry
A set of gunflints and other artefacts produced by Fred Snare at Brandon is an example of ways in which craftsmen in a declining trade attempted to create new markets by introducing new techniques and forms, and finding new ways to sell traditional skills. Sample sets and artefacts made for collectors reflect how some gunflint knappers, drawing on romantic conceptions of their craft as 'heritage', assigned new meanings to the flint industry as pa…
Ambiguous Endurance
It has been suggested that the atlatl, the weapon associated with Basketmaker and Archaic cultures in the Southwest until the advent of the bow and arrow, survived alongside the bow into late Pueblo times. This is not simply a matter of technological chronology, since it raises issues of recognizing complex artifacts in the fragmentary archaeological record, and affects interpretations of subsistence, warfare, symbolism, ethnicity and cultural co…
Cushing's Key Marco Atlatls
Two forms of prehistoric atlatl or spear thrower were recovered from a Florida swamp in 1895 by Frank Hamilton Cushing. Modern research on spear throwers requires a more useful detailed description of these artifacts, and leads to attempts to replicate and test them. In this case, replicative experiments provide some subjective evaluations of the atlatls, and several possible interpretive directions. As in many replicative experiments, physical t…
Alonia
Prepared threshing floors, used with flint-toothed threshing sledges drawn by animals, were a common feature of traditional Mediterranean agriculture. Archaeological examples of threshing floors are known from at least the first millennium BC in Greece. Although they are widespread, common, durable, and economically and socially important, few archaeologists have attempted to interpret or even describe them. The ethnoarchaeological information ne…
Athkiajas
The Cypriot threshing sledge supported one of the last flintknapping Industries around the Mediteranean. Interviews with a former athkiajas (knapper) and others depict a simple, efficient, and highly specialized knapping technology, which was part of a complex of traditional agricultural practices. Within this Industry can be seen temporal, regional, and individual Variation, which is now difficult to document. The knapping and other crafts invol…
Lizard Man Village
A preliminary assessment of results from the excavation of Lizard Man Village, a small Sinagua pueblo and pit house site near Flagstaff, Arizona, suggests that the Sinagua were less hierarchically organized than some recent work has argued. Small sites like Lizard Man have a wider range of goods, facilities, and burials, and thus evidence of a greater participation in economic, ritual, and social systems than might be expected in a strongly centr…
Nineteenth Century Gunflints from the Nepalese Armory
Making Arrowpoints in a Prehistoric Pueblo
Two deposits of workshop debris from Grasshopper Pueblo provide information on the manufacture of small, pressure flaked arrowpoints. A number of indications are interpreted to suggest that although some specialized lithic work areas exist and stone tools were economically important, their makers were unlikely to have been highly specialized craftsmen
Arrowheads, folklore, and documentary sources
Documentary sources, even some that appear to be eyewitness accounts of events and processes of interest to archaeologists, must be carefully evaluated. Some are infected by the folklore of the time, and some of this folklore has thus crept into archaeological “knowledge.” Our analysis of arrows and projectile points represents one example where traditional understandings derived from ethnographic sources and contemporary documents should be ques…
Moses Atticizing
Parker on Retrospective Bridging
Epekeina nou kai ousias
A Hellenistic Context for John 10, 29
A HELLENISTIC CONTEXT FOR JOHN 10, 29 BY JOHN WHITTAKER The text of the first part of John 10, 29 is, as C. K. Barrett has put it,' "in confusion", and in spite of Barrett's discussion and, more recently, that of J. N. Birdsall2 the confusion has hardly been dispelled. The most attractive reading on internal grounds, Barrett readily admits, is 6 xalfi p you öç 6£6wK£v got Ttdvreov gfi?cov E6'Llv. This is the text, the antiquity of which is now at…
"Parisinus Graecus" 1962 and the Writings of Albinus
Jamblique de Chalcis, Exegete et Philosophe
A "Vetus Dictum" in St. Ambrose
Harpocration and Serenus in a Paris manuscript
Whittaker John. Harpocration and Serenus in a Paris manuscript. In: Scriptorium, Tome 33 n°1, 1979. pp. 59-62
Christianity and Morality in the Roman Empire
CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE BY JOHN WHITTAKER The specific originality of Christianity - the feature or features of its teaching by which it distinguishes itself most markedly from other faiths - has been sought in various directions down through the ages by successive generations of scholars, theologians and ordinary believers. W. C. van Unnik, in common with many others, would like to find this vital, distinguishing feature of…
New experimental evidence on the relation between percussion flaking and flake variation
A Consideration of Observational Error in Lithic Use Wear Analysis
(1982). A Consideration of Observational Error in Lithic Use Wear Analysis. Lithic Technology: Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 59-63
Continuity and Change in Stone Tools at Mission Tumacacori, Arizona
Flaked stone tools from mission period contexts at Tumacacori are described and compared with related assemblages. Small triangular projectile points are particularly revealing of trends toward the simplification and eventual loss of native technologies in the face of competition with imported tools and materials
Unproductive Lithic Resources at Lake Mead
Artifacts from 24 chipping stations and a lithic scatter from the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada were analyzed by refitting conjoinable flakes to original cores. Artifacts represented debitage from the initial reduction of locally-available low-quality chalcedony nodules for the eventual production of flake tools. The refitting analysis allowed the debitage to be divided into four patterns that roughly correlate with variation in the …
Platonic Philosophy in the Early Centuries of the Empire
Individual Variation as an Approach to Economic Organization
The ability to trace the products of individuals in the archaeological record can enhance our knowledge of economic and social structures. Ethnological and experimental information combined with archaeological data is necessary to study individual stylistic variation. Projectile point sets from burials at Grasshopper Pueblo in Arizona were examined using dimensional attributes and also attributes describing patterns of flake-scar orientation. Poi…
Making Arrowpoints in a Prehistoric Pueblo
Two deposits of workshop debris from Grasshopper Pueblo provide information on the manufacture of small, pressure flaked arrowpoints. A number of indications are interpreted to suggest that although some specialized lithic work areas exist and stone tools were economically important, their makers were unlikely to have been highly specialized craftsmen
Arizona Bifaces of Wyoming Chert
Seven bifaces from sites in Arizona and one from New Mexico are so similar in material, form, and workmanship that a single source is inferred. The distinctive raw material is tentatively identified as "Tiger Chert" from southwestern Wyoming. These finds suggest widespread exchange of large bifaces among the pueblos of the late thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, and a previously unrecognized contact to the north
Lizard Man Village
A preliminary assessment of results from the excavation of Lizard Man Village, a small Sinagua pueblo and pit house site near Flagstaff, Arizona, suggests that the Sinagua were less hierarchically organized than some recent work has argued. Small sites like Lizard Man have a wider range of goods, facilities, and burials, and thus evidence of a greater participation in economic, ritual, and social systems than might be expected in a strongly centr…
Sinagua Painted Armbands
An unusual painted fiber armband from Lizard Man Village, and related material from elsewhere, suggest that such artifacts are a rarely documented but consistent feature of Sinagua prehistory. Because they are scarce and perishable, their significance is unclear, but they may be more than decorative
Flintknapping
Flintknapping is an ancient craft enjoying a resurgence of interest among both amateur and professional students of prehistoric cultures. In this new guide, John C. Whittaker offers the most detailed handbook on flintknapping currently available and the only one written from the archaeological perspective of interpreting stone tools as well as making them. Flintknapping contains detailed, practical information on making stone tools. Whittaker sta…
Athkiajas
The Cypriot threshing sledge supported one of the last flintknapping Industries around the Mediteranean. Interviews with a former athkiajas (knapper) and others depict a simple, efficient, and highly specialized knapping technology, which was part of a complex of traditional agricultural practices. Within this Industry can be seen temporal, regional, and individual Variation, which is now difficult to document. The knapping and other crafts invol…
Evaluating consistency in typology and classification
Surviving Adversity
Based on more than ten years of field work, this is the only modern interpretive site report on the Sinagua culture.Lizard Man Village is one of many small settlements the Flagstaff vicinity occupied by the Sinagua between AD 1050 and 1300. Generally considered affiliated with the Mogollon, the major archaeological culture group central Arizona, the Sinagua inhabited a region where three distinct groups intersected: the Mogollon, the Hohokam, and…
Alonia
Prepared threshing floors, used with flint-toothed threshing sledges drawn by animals, were a common feature of traditional Mediterranean agriculture. Archaeological examples of threshing floors are known from at least the first millennium BC in Greece. Although they are widespread, common, durable, and economically and socially important, few archaeologists have attempted to interpret or even describe them. The ethnoarchaeological information ne…
Replicas, Fakes, and Art
In addition to archaeologists who make stone tools for experimental purposes, there is a growing number of flintknappers who make lithic artifacts for fun and for profit. The scale of non-academic knapping is little known to archaeologists, and is connected to a flourishing market for antiquities, fakes, replicas, and modern lithic art. Modern stone tools are being produced in vast numbers, and are inevitably muddling the prehistoric record. Mode…
Archaeology (39 works) · History (32 works) · Geography (28 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (26 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (17 works) · History (15 works) · Art (13 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Geology (12 works)