The Perforated baton - Wikipedia or “bâton de commandement” as it was previously known, is an enigmatic stone age artifact of uncertain purpose, being at times hypothesized to be a symbol of authority, a spear thrower or straightener, or a rope-making tool.
I was thinking of Benjamin Franklin and his Leyden jar practical jokes. Thinking like you is scary. I will speak to my physician and minister.
I haven’t heard of those but that’s pretty cool. As a former archer (hunting), I had to straighten an arrow or two, but I always just steamed them and bent the whole arrow. Aren’t there still H/G tribes out there? I wonder what they use?
Since this is the Straight Dope, don’t forget to mention the fact that the Druids didn’t build Stonehenge. They almost certainly had no more knowledge about its purpose than we do, probably less.
you mean Nigel Tufnel was wrong?
Next think you’ll tell me Stonehenge isn’t 18" tall!
Hah! I went to school with the person who founded Iron Maiden, but I’ve never seen the Tap.
The film? Oh you must! “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever”, and the movie is on the right side.
There are numerous accounts of arrow-straightening by hunter-gatherers (or subsistence archers, in general). It was mostly done just by using hands, pushing the shaft against a bend or kink.
Any smooth, hard object, like a length of polished bone, can be used to stroke the bend out of a natural material shaft very quickly and easily - this is what I do, hunting with wooden bows and arrows in a Subboreal environment where shaft straightening is often needed.
Some indigenous peoples used their teeth, others an object with a arrow-shaft sized hole in it, to yank a bend out a shaft. These two methods are vastly inferior, mostly too aggressive and needlessly complex, in my opinion, but are the basis for the “arrow straightener” hypothesis.
Batons de commandment predate archery in Eurasia, and their holes are much too big for arrow shafts, anyway. Spears and darts were of course in use.
Noted archer, bowyer and hunter, Paul Comstock, has convincingly hypothized and demonstrated, down to use-wear evidence, that Batons were spear throwers that were in use before the more familiar spear thrower types. I personally think he’s right.
I don’t know. Unless I misread that account, a knob had to be added. I don’t see anywhere on the originals that a knob could be added. Further, in my (very little) experience with atlatl-type chuckers, I found that they need to be more or less straight as the throwing hand has to hold both the baton and the spear. The curved nature of the batons seem to rule this out.
After watching many wooden arrow straightening videos, I very highly doubt they were used as arrow straighteners. The hassle of keeping a device on you wouldn’t be worth it as you could use any rock laying around nearby.
One thing I do know, they are cool and I want one!
And since the copper cant connect out, it could not have been used like that. Scroll storage.
We do know it was long before the era of the druids. Likely a sacred and holy place. Some astronomical alignments, but not an ancient observatory.
AMC Pacer and Gremlin. A Two-Fer!
Nonsense! AMC said “hold my beer” when challenged to build a car that was more wide than long.
The Baghdad Battery was made before the potato was known to the old world so perhaps it was used to power a clock.
Electroplating precious metals like gold and silver requires small amounts of direct current. Something like the “Baghdad battery” would be perfect.
The “out of place artifacts” sounds interesting, but there really aren’t any. Or very few. Most of them turn out to be forgeries or common items misinterpreted. The “Coso Artifact” was noted by some to look very much like a spark plug from a Ford Model T, encased in dirt. Turns out, it was a spark plug.
There have been a fair number of documented accounts of ordinary household items found deep in coal mines underground, in the coal veins. That’s pretty strange, no idea on that.
The problem with that theory is that there are no electroplated items from that area from that time.
This is fairly simple to explain; some rocks are soft, or slightly friable, and it wouldn’t take much for an interested party to insert a small item into a seam or layer, perhaps allowing another, innocent party to ‘discover’ them.
In other words, ‘documented accounts of ordinary items in coal veins’ are all hoaxes, frauds, and practical jokes.
Electroplating goes back a long, long ways. Are we sure about that? It certainly looks like a utilitarian device, and as a practical matter would be almost useless for any other purpose.
True enough, lots of hoaxes out there. Ole Sven just happens to find a strange flat rock on his farm with old Norse inscription on it. Sure buddy. The winters in Minnesota get pretty long.
Would we even know if there were? Could we tell if a gold item is solid gold or electroplated?