[Dan Kary]

Hi everybody,

I'm looking for museum examples of 15th century darts. Apparently a problem is that a lot of dart heads get misclassified as large arrow heads. I'm trying to pin down a decent range for socket size, dimensions of the heads (in particular, the barbed ones), and the length of the shaft. I'm not coming up with much on google searches, or pinterest, etc. Are there any tips you can share with me to find something?

Thank you very much!

[Sean Manning]

Its one of the most solid results in archaeology that there is no bright line between arrowheads, throwing spear heads, and thrusting spear heads. All you can do is open the drawer or the catalogue labeled "projectile points" or "arrowheads" or "spearheads" and start to study. A recent thread had someone who had seen some 15th century European heads which probably belonged to darts.

[Dan Kary]

Hm. Thanks Sean. This in itself is interesting. It seems that, at least the heads of arrows and darts were made identically - there isn't something that can make you say "ah yeah that's a dart because of x, y, z" - other than size of course (and that's vague except, probably, examples on the extreme large or small sizes)!

[Sean Manning]

If we had a lot of intact darts, lances, pikes, lancegays/javelins/staves, quarrels, and arrows, we might be able to group the heads according to function. But if all you have is the heads its really hard because different cultures had different ideas abot what was too big to shoot from a bow. There must be a few medieval and sixteenth-century darts in collections somewhere and there are several Pinterest accounts with collections of paintings and sculptures of darts.