Miniature slingshot

The cradle and beads of this miniature slingshot were made from hammered silver sheet and connected with cotton thread. Made by artisans of the Chancay or Chimú cultures that thrived on the central and northern coast of Peru in the last centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire, it is part of a larger group of 35 of miniature silver objects representing musical instruments, digging sticks, throwing sticks, and other items, including components of a funerary procession such as a litter (King, et al., 2000:48, no. 19). The precise meaning of such miniatures is unknown, but they may have served a votive purpose in their original context (see Hamilton, 2018, on the subject of scale in the Andes).

In addition to maces and spears or darts, slingshots were a major weapon in Precolumbian Peru. Woven slingshots were found associated with some of the earliest textiles known in the Americas, dated to the Pre-Ceramic period, or 10,000—1,800 BCE (Bird, 1985), and were common at later times in the central and southern coastal regions. Slingshots were made of many different materials including cotton, wool, beads, reeds, and combinations of these and other materials (Owen and Flynn, 2017; see also 1987.394.669). The cradle—the part of the slingshot that held the projectile, such as a stone—was made in a variety of forms: some were cup-like, whereas others were shaped using thicker cable-like braids.

References and Further Reading

Bird, Junius. The Preceramic Excavations at the Huaca Prieta, Chicama Valley, Peru (New York: Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 62, pt. 1, 1985).

Hamilton, Andrew. Scale & The Incas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

King, Heidi, Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, and Paloma Carcedo de Mufarech. Rain of the Moon: Silver in Ancient Peru (New York, New Haven and London: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000).

Owen, Rodrick, and Terry N. Flynn. Sling Braiding Traditions and Techniques: From Peru, Bolivia, and Around the World (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2017).