Ambiguous Endurance: Late Atlatls in the American Southwest?

It has been suggested that the atlatl, the weapon associated with Basketmaker and Archaic cultures in the Southwest until the advent of the bow and arrow, survived alongside the bow into late Pueblo times. This is not simply a matter of technological chronology, since it raises issues of recognizing complex artifacts in the fragmentary archaeological record, and affects interpretations of subsistence, warfare, symbolism, ethnicity and cultural contact. Reasons to doubt the late survival of atlatls include the ambiguity of the supposed evidence, uncertainty about atlatl functions and efficiency, and the lack of late examples among the few dated specimens and in late contexts generally.