Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lam and this is The Artifact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow

Your Mind focusing on particular objects, ideas and moments in time.

Artifacts have long enabled human beings to create for themselves the defensive and offensive features

found naturally elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

We lack the talent but invented the dagger.

Devised in our minds and created with our hands weapons and armor of some sort can be found

everywhere human spread throughout the world.

In many cases the form and function of traditional weapons are much the same but there's still a huge variety in materials and form.

One of the more fascinating specimens of human weapon craft is the Machuieta of Mesoamerica.

In the Nahuatl language the name means Handwood and it's served as a ferocious weapon for various peoples of this region including the Maya, the Toltex and the Aztecs.

The Machuieta may be described in various ways, often comparing it to other tools and weapons.

As the name seems to imply it is a handheld length of shape wood, some 70 centimeters long, a little over two feet.

It was wielded with two hands though a shorter variation also existed.

The tendency here of course is to compare the weapon to either a club or a sword.

And this was certainly the case when Spanish forces first observed the Machuieta during the 16th century.

But this is a weapon of wood, not metal, unlike the typical sword.

Yet early Western commentators noted its exceptional cutting ability.

This due to the 6-8 blades of obsidian set into the weapon on two sides.

As such it is easy to think of it as a toothed blade or as a toothed club or mace.

As pointed out by Marco Antonio Svera Obrugan in his 2006 paper The Machuieta,

an innovative weapon of the late post-classic in Mesoamerica published in Arms and Armor,

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