As a library volunteer i'm often shelving and cleaning books so that i come into contact with many books. I found a book on Chumash tribes in California. Being me i flipped over the the hunting and fishing section in search of slings. I found a short one sentence statement about slings used in Chumash tribes. I forget the title of the book, and I can't find the book on Google books either. It was a pamphlet/ small paper bound book designed as an aid to student in the California Education system to provide more detailed information on individual tribes in California (the standards don't cover much).

The statement said only "slingshots could kill birds and small animals". The only reason i thought this was somewhat interesting was that disproves a statement before that stated in North America slings may have been introduced to the Native Americans by the Europeans (i.g. the Apache). However, the Pamphlet was based on Pre-European contact culture.

Just found out the link i was referring to, http://slinging.org/index.php?page=the-chumash-sling---paul-campbell. it supports parts of  the article that the Chumash had native slingers. However, based on the pamphlet it was probably a toy to the Chumash as compared to their bows. Based on the article it was used for war?  

From what I know of North American Tribes, I think the sling was too widely disseminated throughout North America to have been picked up from Europeans. It also appears in the earliest European journals. Much too early to have been something just picked up.

From our own wiki:

The oldest sling from the New World was uncovered in Lovelock Cave, Nevada. The sling was found next to partially mummified body of a 6 year old male and was originally dated to about 272-792 B.C. These dates have since been revised, due to more accurate carbon dating methods, and now place the sling around 1222 B.C. It was woven from Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum).

http://slinging.org/wiki/index.php?title=Famous_Historical_Slings

However, the Egyptian Kahun sling in Manchester, UK is older at 1800 BC.

I seem to remember from the old Icelandc Norse sagas that Leiv Ericson and the gang met natives with slings when they reached America some 500 years before Columbus.

There are accounts about the use of the sling by the indians when they fought against the Spaniards. So I think that the first settlers carry slings with them when they crossed the Bering Strait from Asia.

Quote:


You can see North American slings here

http://perso.wanadoo.es/hondero/sling34.html

Greetings.

Hi

Here where you can read "Indios Norteamerica" (what means North American Indians" ) if you click you can see many North American slings.

http://perso.wanadoo.es/hondero/museo.htm

Where you can read "Honda indígena de México" ("Native sling from Mexico"). As far as I know Mexico is part of North America and only the Southernmost belongs to Central America)

What I don't know is if they are originally from the North American Natives or if the Indians saw it from the fist European settlers. I think the first option far more likely.

Greetings.

As prehistoric evidence goes, the Lovelock cave find is the only indisputable evidence we have, but some clay balls in California sites have been interpreted as sling projectiles. Means, writing in 1919, referenced these sites but I haven't been able to find original site descriptions of the clay objects.

However, I have been looking a lot into the ethnographic record and it is pretty convincing to me. Firstly, the geographic scope of the sling's use seems to have been very broad. Though most of my research hits have been along the pacific coast or in the Southwest, I have references to sling use among the Cherokee and various Inuit groups. Secondly, slings seem to have been adapted to a wide variety of tasks, including small-game and waterfowl hunting, warfare, ritualized combats, defending crops from pest species and as toys (naturally enough, everyone agrees you have to start young). If slings were introduced at contact, it seems unlikely that they would have been so quickly and readily adapted to new purposes - especially since European contact brought better technology (namely guns). In fact, the ethnographies I've been through thus far mostly talk about declining sling use as European goods become more common. Several ethnographers outright state that the sling "is an aboriginal weapon" or something to that effect.

The radiocarbon date for the lowest layer is 2482+-260 years BP, but the child's burial (at least in the 1952 Heizer article) is not directly dated. They only state that the sling is definitely no older than this, and "probably somewhat younger". Using AMS 14C dating it may be possible to date either the bones or the sling directly, but as these are from a burial context it runs directly into NAGPRA so I think improvement on this dating is unlikely.