The Invention of the (Poisoned) Blowgun by South American Peoples

One of the coolest Indigenous American weapons was the blowgun, which was developed well before the Columbian exchange. You can see painted on this ceramic from the modern Guatemalan Highlands from the Late Classic Maya period (CE 600-900) a row of hunters holding their blowguns as they return from a hunt (this image is a “rolled-out” image of the ceramic).

However, there aren’t many extant examples of pre-Columbian blowguns, which makes sense since they were made from organic materials likely to decompose quickly. However, some scholars argue that the blowgun was first developed in South America, spreading northwards after into Central America. One tribe still in existence and still making these weapons are the Yagua peoples from modern Peru and Columbia, and their blowguns were pretty badass.

The Yagua blowguns, known as _pucuna_, were hand-wrapped in the skins of a root plant called the huambe. The darts often were sharpened with piranha teeth and dipped in poison called curare which is a neurotoxin. The nerves attaching to skeletal muscles would start to freeze up and cause paralysis in about 10 minutes.

Because the Yagua pucuna were so long (for instance, seven and a half feet), they could shoot targets about 325 feet — almost the length of a football field, at a velocity of 425 feet *per second*. Small wonder that blowguns were used across the Americas before gun technology superceded it.