The organic portions of bows and arrows and of spears, darts
and atlatls (spear throwers) tend to rot and are only
occasionally recovered from archeological sites. The main
archeological evidence for the adoption of the bow and arrow
in North America is a change from larger to smaller chipped-stone
projectile points. The larger stone points are thought to have
been used on spears or darts while the smaller points are
interpretted as arrow points. This argument becomes more compelling
when most or all of the stone points used at a given time were of
the smaller size.
This reference gives a good overview of the evidence:
Blitz, John
1988 Adoption of the Bow in Prehistoric North America. North
American Archaeologist 9(2):123-145.
Based on his review of the available literature, Blitz (1988:132)
gives the following chronology. The earliest occurrence of the bow
in North America was in the Arctic, with dates ranging from
ca. 3000 B.C. in Alaska to ca. 1500 B.C. in the eastern Arctic.
The situation in the Subarctic is not well understood. In what
is now southern Canada and the continental U.S., the bow was
adopted at times ranging from ca. A.D. 200 to ca. A.D. 800.
Tristine Lee Smart
Museum of Anthropology
University of Michigan
Tristine.Lee.Smart@um.cc.umich.edu