As a final note, I must commend the author for her choices of absorbing illustrations from Renaissance books; they enhance the present volume immensely.
In all, this book is fascinating in its subject matter, articulate in its presentation, and admirable in its scholarship. It will, no doubt, provoke much thought in students and scholars of the Renaissance. We gather outside when night falls.
I sit down shirtless and Tumi, an elder wearing a necklace of howler monkey teeth, pushes a pencil-thin stick into a smoldering log until its tip glows orange. He presses the hot tip against my left shoulder in three separate spots, then gently peels away the blistered skin to reveal three pink points.
It comes on fast. A scorching full-body flush swells my lips, face and throat. The thumps of my heart crescendo with each pump as sweat pours. I curl up into a ball, eyes shut and forehead resting in the dirt. Twenty minutes later I throw up the excessive amount of water I was instructed to drink before the ceremony. Ryan Benson is a freelance writer and marketing consultant based in Minneapolis.
Find him on Instagram: RyanJBenson. Home All Sections. Log In Welcome, User. Coronavirus Minneapolis St. Paul Duluth St. Twin Cities housing market shows churn but no signs of an urban exodus. Roads icy as another round of snow heads for the Twin Cities. Minnesota family that lost the road to its home will get it back. For 2nd straight month, Americans quit jobs at a record pace. Federal court declines to lift stay on vaccine mandate. Leon stated that when Acacia mellifera liquid is added to the poison, it foams like soap.
This causes the victim to foam from the nose and mouth, further hastening its death as it struggles to breathe. Squeezing grub viscera onto the Asparagus powder in the scapula mortar; B. After adding Acacia mellifera inner bark and spittle mix, the poison is mixed well in the mortar.
Note the snake beans in the foreground; C. Poison is applied to the sinew on the shank of the arrowhead using a wooden applicator; D. The poisoned arrow is twirled over the coals to dry the poison. The composite poison was now ready to apply to the arrows. Each man took one arrow.
The poison applicator was used to lift and smear the orange poison entirely along the length of each sinew-wrapped arrow shank, cautiously avoiding the sharp arrowhead as well as fingers Fig 13C. The application was slow and repetitive, and nothing was spilt on the ground.
Anointed arrows were twirled just above the dying coals to dry the poison Fig 13D. A log was placed near the coals and the arrows were then propped upright against it, their bases pushed into the sand.
The poison thus dried slowly next to the fire. While the poison was drying, both men used their knives to whittle away traces of poison from their applicator sticks and the wooden pestle. The scapula mortar was wiped clean with the chewed pulp of the Acacia mellifera inner bark, and afterwards with a slice of Harpagophytum procumbens ; then both cleaning agents were discarded next to the fire. He scraped from the metal shaft the existing, dry and cracked poison and flaking sinew, then chewed a length of kudu sinew, wound it the full length of the metal shaft, and rubbed the sinew wrapping with Terminalia sericea gum moistened with saliva.
This renovated arrow was also poisoned. Each paste plays a task-specific role, and none of these fixatives can be a substitute for the others.
We did not observe any differences in the manufacture or use of paste ingredients in the three villages. Ammocharis coranica bulb scale glue is a simple, single component, waterproof fixative paste that can be reconstituted by heating and kneading. It is used for fixing heavy duty weapons like spears and implements like axes to their shafts or handles, and for mending various artefacts.
Ozoroa schinzii latex is mixed with powdered carbonized grass, Aristeda adscensionis , to form a compound adhesive that remains pliable and is not water soluble. Beeswax can be a substitute for O. The Ozoroa adhesive is the first fixative smeared on the grass arrow shaft to enable binding with animal sinew to prevent the shaft from splitting. Terminalia sericea gum is simple, water soluble glue a saccharide that is used for the final sealing of sinew on spear shafts or on arrow components such as grass shafts, collars and metal arrow shanks.
Silberbauer [ 35 ] reported the use of T. Some plant use practices are therefore widespread and cross language barriers. In Nyae Nyae, Chrysomelid beetle grubs are the most important component of modern arrow poison, but several plant taxa serve as optional additives to the grub entrails.
The choice of plant, and means of preparation, can vary between villages. To some extent this variability among poison recipes is due to availability. The snake bean is, for example, in short supply in parts of Nyae Nyae, and people rely on gifts of Swartzia madagascariensis pods from those with access to the trees. All three villages we visited used Asparagus exuvialis tuber sap mixed with grub entrails, but its preparation process varied.
Eagle Pos hunters boiled and reduced A. In contrast, the Dou Pos hunters blended viscera with fresh, heated sap squeezed directly from A. Archaeologists are unlikely to recognise such subtle differences in preparation of ingredients. Furthermore, the application of the poison to the sinew-wrapped shanks of metal arrowheads was done in the same way at all three villages; it is the finale to a time consuming and activity-rich process of product extraction and preparation.
Even though we have recorded some minor differences in poison recipes between close villages, the weapons themselves seem standardised in form and manufacture.
Furthermore, hunting customs in the Nyae Nyae area traditionally did not require hunters to restrict themselves to the territory of their own band [ 33 ]. Yet, notwithstanding the tendency for technological conformity, the hunters adapt readily to the use of new raw materials when these offer convenience or improved performance.
The employment of metal arrowheads instead of traditional bone points is the best available example, but the recent replacement of organic quivers with plastic pipes is another case in point.
Xo have tangs on their triangular arrowheads, so these geographically distinct linguistic groups are also separated stylistically [ 51 ]. Intimate botanical knowledge and knowledge of raw materials in the Nyae Nyae environment are learned during childhood because children watch hunters making and refurbishing weaponry.
It takes many years for a man to become an accomplished bow and arrow hunter. Boys play at shooting with toy arrows from about the age of seven onwards until, at adolescence, they begin to hunt with their fathers [ 33 ]. With rare exceptions, all men hunt and there is social pressure among men to be hunters [ 33 ]. Men make and poison their own arrows even though men may share batches of poison, take turns in making it [ 33 , 34 ], and sometimes exchange arrows [ 51 ]. The strength of the poison mixture is critical to the success of the hunt because the arrows are adapted to transport poison, not to kill animals by wounding them [ 33 , 34 ].
The materials science involved in making the poison allows some leeway for experimentation in terms of additives, but the poison grubs seem to be essential ingredients. The Nyae Nyae hunters distinguish Diamphidia and Polyclada genera, but they consider them male and female of the same taxon and will use either [ 33 , 34 ]. Marshall [ 33 ] wrote about the use of Andropogon gayanus grass shafts and an unspecified black plant paste for sealing sinew to shaft.
She furthermore recorded the use of yellow gum, from an Acacia tree whereas we observed the use of Terminalia sericea gum , for gluing sinew to the metal arrow shank [ 33 ], but she did not document that the black adhesive forms the first layer of fixative paste on shafts, and that yellow gum is the final, outer sealant.
She chronicled the four components of the deadly arrow, the use of poison grubs and the mixing of composite poison [ 33 ].
She confirmed that various recipes are used, depending on the availability of products. The Dengwe hunters we met also made use of Sansevieria leaves Fig 2 , although they used them for twine, not poison. In a separate poison-making session, Marshall [ 33 ] recorded the use of an Asparagus sp.
Giess and Snyman [ 48 ] identify this particular Asparagus as A. Giess and Snyman [ 48 ] confirm the use of poison recipe ingredients that we heard about at all three villages in Nyae Nyae, and they list some that we were not told of.
Potential additions to the poison grubs include: Ipomoea bolusiana , Jatropha erythropoda , Lonchocarpus nelsii , Raphionacme burkei , R. Ipomoea bolusiana and Jatropha erythropoda tubers are grated and the juice that is squeezed out is used to mix into arrow poison [ 48 ]. Chewed Lonchocarpus nelsii bark is said to soften the arrow poison directly before hunting [ 48 ], while Raphionacme lanceolata juice from the tuber may be applied to the poison to keep it firmly attached to the arrow [ 48 ], and liquid from roasted Sansevieria aethiopica leaves or Tarchonanthus camphoratus leaf tea serves the same purpose [ 48 ].
Four or five fresh pupae of Chrysomelid beetles are macerated with a few grams of powder from baked Swartzia madagascariensis seed pods and a salivary extract of Acacia bark [ 52 ]. Some of the plants described here are environment specific and will therefore not be available for collection in different southern African biomes. Poison grub manifestation is restricted to particular vegetation communities because the beetles are hosted by trees in the Anarcadiaceae and Burseraceae families.
Surveys suggest that there are at least 25 poison recipes known in southern Africa [ 15 , 53 ]. Both Schapera [ 54 ] and Dornan [ 55 ] record recipes in which plants can be used alone, as well as recipes in which plant and animal components for example, snake poison as a substitute for the poison grub are mixed.
Early travellers in the s, such as the botanist and medical man, Thunberg, mentioned the use of poison by all hunter-gatherers that he encountered across southern Africa [ 56 — 58 ].
This underscores the likelihood that poison recipes are part of cultural traditions backed by a wealth of botanical knowledge, and probably with a long history of trial and error. Indeed, the variability that we observe today in the Nyae Nyae region may reflect only a fraction of earlier technical systems, perhaps determined, in part, by different ecological niches. As archaeologists we want to know what time depth could be associated with glues, adhesives and poisons.
At present we have some archaeological evidence for the use of southern African glues, adhesives and poison, but the issue of continuity through time is not clear-cut.
Part of our challenge is the absence of modern hunter-gatherers in the areas where we have archaeological evidence. Furthermore there are ecological differences between the areas where hunter-gatherers live today and where the archaeological sites are situated, so different sets of resources are applicable. The resin used as fixative at Diepkloof and Border Cave is from Podocarpus a genus not present in Nyae Nyae , and the conifer resin identified on some of the Sibudu tools may also be Podocarpus.
At Diepkloof and Border Cave, the resin may have been deliberately mixed with fragmented bone and quartz grains, and at Border Cave charcoal is a further additive, but such components can easily be contaminants, so the interpretation of compound adhesive use incorporating Podocarpus is not completely secure. At Sibudu, conifer resin was sometimes mixed with red ochre and animal fat. Only three Sibudu tools have successfully undergone chemical analysis, but microscopy reveals other mixtures of ingredients that appear to include ochre, plant exudates and maybe animal products.
Further chemical analyses are needed on ancient tools to establish securely the technical complexity that preliminary work suggests. It is our intention, as the work develops, to conduct GC-MS in addition to other tests appropriate for the materials in hand. We shall analyse modern comparative materials as well as available archaeological residues.
While we already know that varied recipes were used in the past, we have not yet explored the possibility that different fixative pastes may have been layered on a single artefact, as has been demonstrated at Nyae Nyae. We also do not yet know for certain whether particular fixative pastes were restricted to certain artefact classes, as they are at Nyae Nyae.
The Nyae Nyae fixative pastes are task-specific, for example, as mentioned earlier, there are different fixative pastes for heavy and light-duty tools and weapons. We found no compelling evidence for diverse hafting traditions in Nyae Nyae. The variability that we observed was limited to poison recipes. There seems considerable scope for idiosyncratic poison recipes and we have yet to discover whether this was also the case in the past. The Border Cave lump of beeswax mixed with poisonous sap is undoubtedly a compound product.
It is tempting to suggest that this represents combined glue and poison, a product that possibly implies technical sophistication equal to that at Nyae Nyae. Nonetheless, we are cognisant that there is little continuity between the modern and ancient practices, even after taking into account the ecological disjunctions between our ethnographic and archaeological observations. This suggests that we should exercise caution when we are tempted to assume continuity in the manufacture and uses of material culture from prehistory to the present.
We are also aware that archaeological sites may not preserve some of the items that we see at Nyae Nyae today, even if they were used in the past; degradation is an issue that residue analysts constantly face. These include spatulas, hollow bones or stones used for mixing bowls, and containers or sticks for storing glue or poison.
Our ethnographic observations make us realise how carefully we need to examine archaeologically recovered objects like hollow bones for residues that may suggest their use during manufacture of various substances. In addition, we need to bear in mind that some ingredients may have been brought to a site from afar. We also acknowledge that some micro-residues, like those described earlier, preserve well on stone tools, but that we are not able to detect products that have disappeared because of diagenesis or other post-depositional processes.
Thus precise recipes for fixative pastes and poisons used in the past may be unrecoverable. However, what has been lost sometimes represents discontinuity in technical systems and traditions through time, for example, the Border Cave applicator stick bears poison that has no modern equivalent. Our ethnographic study has value for creating models that archaeologists can reference, but it also demonstrates that ethnography cannot be used in a simplistic way to interpret archaeological data.
It was a privilege to work with them. We thank Dr John Kinahan for kind assistance and hospitality. Dr Renee Reddy identified Asparagus exuvialis. We thank Richard Fullagar and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Browse Subject Areas? Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper.
Download: PPT. Table 1. Residues that imply hafting on archaeologically-recovered stone tools. Fig 1. Map of Nyae Nyae Conservancy showing the localities discussed in the text. The Preparation of Glue and Adhesive in the Tsumkwe area 1. Ammocharis coranica glue Many Ammocharis coranica bulbs grow close to the road between Tsumkwe and Gautscha S Terminalia sericea glue A dense Terminalia sericea grove on the Gautscha road S Fig 4.
Creating Ozoroa schinzii adhesive at Eagle Pos. Using Glue and Adhesive as Part of Making Arrows Traditionally arrowheads used in the Nyae Nyae area were manufactured from bone, but iron arrowheads have largely replaced these. Fig 6.
Using glue and adhesive to assemble an arrow at Eagle Pos. The Preparation of Poison for Use on Arrows Poison production is complex and involves planning, many action steps, and considerable care and skill. Fig Three stages in the life cycle of the Chrysomelid beetle found under a marula tree in Tsumkwe. Asparagus exuvialis sap On the road to Gautscha, only a few kilometres from Tsumkwe S In missions that take place in Marrakesh , the player has a unique opportunity to poison a Shisha Pipe also known as a hookah , which is a large, immobile vaping device used in the Middle East and some adjacent cultures.
Because the pipes have more than one stem and can be used by multiple people simultaneously, more than one person can be poisoned with a single dose. Additionally, there are a few characters who snort lines of cocaine throughout the series, and this substance can be poisoned in the same manner as other consumables. However, these opportunities are rare. In addition to poisoning food and drink, some maps now include the possibility of poisoning ventilation systems.
This will turn the affected room into a damaging environment that will inflict its effect upon all characters in its confines. The player will usually be able to use any poison available in his inventory irrespective of whether or not the particular poison comes in a form that would be actually suitable for poisoning air in the real world i. The atmosphere in the contaminated area will sometimes take on a particular hue depending on what kind of poison was used: green for emetic poisons, blue for sedatives, red for lethal substances this visual effect is not present in all levels for some reason.
The contamination will last for several minutes before dispersing unless the player turns off the ventilation system, which will disperse it early.
0コメント