I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM
Mammoth spear thrower
▶ Listen · narrated
Long before metal points and bows, hunters in southern France threw spears with a carved lever. One of those levers took the shape of a mammoth.
At a glance
- Date
- 106th century BC
- Type
- Atlatl; archaeological find
- Findspot
- Bruniquel rock shelters
- Collection
- British Museum (Christy Collection)
Look closer
A lever, not a club
An atlatl is a spear thrower: a short shaft held in the hand, with a hook or spur at the far end that seats against the butt of a light spear or dart. On the throw, the implement acts as an extension of the arm, increasing the speed at which the projectile leaves the hand. This object is that kind of tool, not a stabbing weapon or a ceremonial staff. Its identity as an atlatl is what links the carved animal to a practical hunting kit.
The mammoth is the thrower
The form is not a separate figurine fixed to a handle. The implement itself is shaped as a mammoth, so that the body of the animal and the body of the tool are the same piece of work. Whatever the carver intended by that choice, the result is an object that had to survive repeated stress in the hand while still reading, at a glance, as a living creature from the same landscape.
A shelter find, not a grave gift
The piece is recorded as an archaeological find from the Bruniquel rock shelters. That setting matters. Rock shelters were used and reused by late Ice Age groups; objects recovered from them often belong to ordinary working life rather than to a single burial or cache. The mammoth spear thrower enters the record as equipment from such a place, later collected and catalogued, rather than as a monument left on open ground.
The story
The Mammoth spear thrower is a small atlatl carved in the form of a mammoth. It dates to the 106th century BC and was found at the Bruniquel rock shelters in France. It is now in the British Museum, where it belongs to the Christy Collection and is inventoried as Palart 551.
An atlatl is a throwing lever. One end is gripped; the other engages the rear of a light spear or dart. The extra length lets the thrower impart more speed at release than the arm alone can manage. In that sense the object is straightforward technology. What makes this example distinctive is that the technology and the image are not separated: the shaft is resolved as a mammoth, so that a working part of the hunt carries the likeness of a large animal from the same world.
Who shaped it is unknown by name. The date and the findspot place it among late Ice Age communities in what is now southern France, groups who used rock shelters along river valleys and left behind both tools and carved forms. The reference literature links the piece to the late Magdalenian and to the Montastruc rock shelter at Bruniquel; the museum record treats it as an archaeological find from the Bruniquel shelters. Either way, it is portable equipment recovered from a sheltered site, not a fixed installation.
Its later life is institutional. As part of the Christy Collection it entered the British Museum’s holdings and has been shown in the permanent galleries. Between February and May 2013 it was also displayed in the museum’s exhibition Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind. That path — from shelter floor to private collection to national museum to temporary exhibition — is how a functional Ice Age object becomes a public argument about deep prehistory.
Nothing in the surviving record requires us to treat the mammoth form as pure ornament or pure symbol. It may have been both useful and legible at once. The safer claim is simpler: someone who needed a spear thrower also made that thrower look like a mammoth, and the result was durable enough to be found, kept, and still read as both tool and image.
Why it mattered then
In its own moment the object had a job. A spear thrower earns its keep only if it survives the strain of repeated casts and delivers a projectile with more force than the unaided arm. Carving that lever as a mammoth did not cancel the job; it added a second demand, that the piece remain recognisable as an animal while still working in the hand. For hunters living with real mammoths, or with their recent memory, that choice sat inside ordinary experience rather than outside it. The animal was part of the fauna and the imagination of the age. Making a thrower in its shape folded likeness into kit. We do not know whether the form was meant to secure luck, mark ownership, please the eye, or simply follow a local habit of finishing tools as creatures. What we can say is that function and image were allowed to occupy the same small object, and that the object was used in a landscape of rock shelters where such things could be left, lost, or discarded and later recovered.
Why it matters now
The piece still matters because it refuses a neat split between “art” and “tool.” Museum visitors often meet Ice Age carving as a story of first images and symbolic minds. An atlatl shaped as a mammoth complicates that story without needing grand claims: here the image is load-bearing. It had to work. It also anchors a deep date to a specific place. The 106th century BC is remote enough to feel abstract; Bruniquel is not. A named shelter system, a named collection, and a still-viewable object give the period a concrete handle. For the British Museum the spear thrower is part of how prehistory is shown to the public, including in the 2013 Ice Age Art exhibition. For anyone thinking about technology, it is a reminder that mechanical advantage — the lever — and figurative carving can be the same act of making.
The surprising detail
The object is catalogued both as an atlatl and as an archaeological find, and those two labels pull in slightly different directions. One points to use: a machine for throwing. The other points to afterlife: something recovered from the Bruniquel rock shelters and absorbed into the Christy Collection. The surprise is how completely those identities coexist. Nothing about the mammoth form cancels the lever; nothing about the lever erases the animal. The same few centimetres of carving have to satisfy a hunter’s grip and a viewer’s eye, including viewers twelve thousand years later standing in a museum gallery.
What is disputed
The inception date is given as the 106th century BC; finer dating, and the exact deposit within the Bruniquel shelters, are not settled in the facts used here. Reference accounts name the Montastruc rock shelter at Bruniquel and the late Magdalenian; the core museum record treats the piece as an archaeological find from the Bruniquel rock shelters. Circumstances of the original discovery are thinner than the object’s later museum life.
How it got here
The spear thrower is part of the Christy Collection in the British Museum (Palart 551). It has been shown in the museum’s galleries and was included in the 2013 exhibition Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind. No separate repatriation claim is recorded in the facts supplied for this lesson.
Remember this
A working spear-thrower and a mammoth image in one piece — late Ice Age technology that refused to separate use from likeness.
Test yourself
Why does calling this object both an atlatl and a mammoth carving change how we read Ice Age “art”?
Because the image is not a separate figurine added for display; it is the body of a throwing lever that had to take real mechanical stress. If the mammoth form and the atlatl function are the same object, then figurative carving here sits inside ordinary equipment rather than in a category apart from it. The point is not that every tool was a sculpture, but that our habit of sorting prehistoric things into either technology or art can miss pieces that were clearly both. The Bruniquel find keeps that overlap visible.
Go deeper
Image: © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain. Source.