Low-Tech Spears

"You may be wondering why we have so many foreign treasures here at the British Museum. And the answer is simple: gun beats spear!"

— Frankie Boyle, Mock the Week, "Bad Things to Hear From a Tour Guide"

While simple clubs are often seen as the quintessential weapon of primitive man in fiction, as far as the archeological record goes, it was in fact the humble spear that was the first proper long-range melee weapon created by humans. The oldest surviving example of a spear, the Clacton Spear, dates back to around 400,000 years ago, and evidence suggests an origin of at least 500,000 years ago for hafted stone-tipped spears amongst hominids. In fact, as some populations of chimpanzee, our closest living relatives, have been known to sharpen sticks into spears for hunting purposes, the use of spears as weapons may very well predate the Homo genus itself.

These spears most commonly take the form of a simple sharpened stick, with or without the addition of a spearhead made from flint-knapping, or by using hard animal body parts, such as shells, bone, or horn. However, metal-tipped or otherwise more advanced bladed polearms can also count as examples of the trope as long as the cultures and characters who use them are considered "primitive" or otherwise less advanced, whether by the narrative or by other groups in-universe. The latter includes but by no means is solely limited to factions that use firearms. If there happens to be multiple factions that use spears as weaponry in a given work, this trope would be used to describe solely those with the noticeably least advanced polearm technology, with the culture to match. These spears are most often used as stabbing weapons due to the nature of their construction, but can also be thrown, either by hand or via using a spear thrower such as the atlatl.

A subtrope of Weapon-Based Characterization, and a common mainstay weapon of the Noble Savage, Hollywood Natives, people Raised By Animals, archetypical cavemen (such as Neanderthals), and the like. They're also commonly used as a shorthand for post-apocalyptic societies, as spears are a far easier weapon to create and maintain for a pre-industrial society compared to more modern weaponry such as advanced firearms, even if the means of making said modern weaponry hasn't been outright forgotten over time as a result of societal collapse, and are one of the easiest types of weapon for people used to living in an industrial society to quickly learn how to fashion on their own. Compare Boulder Bludgeon, the use of simple stones as melee weapons by brutish, pragmatic, and desperate characters.

Compare to Javelin Thrower, where polearms are thrown rather than stabbed with. Contrast A Thicket of Spears, where the simplicity and reach of the polearm make them Boring, but Practical infantry weapons to use in formation. Inversions involving high-tech spears often overlap with Enhanced Archaic Weapon and Sufficiently Advanced Bamboo Technology.

Due to the often racist connotations of this trope thanks to it being commonly associated with indigenous-coded cultures in media, No Real Life Examples, Please!.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Mobile Fighter G Gundam: The series is based around each country having a representative in the form of a mobile fighter which often symbolizes their country in some way (e.g. Japan's Gundam has samurai and kabuki themes, America's a surfing gunslinger with football pads... it's a wacky show in a lot of ways). Neo-Kenya's Zebra Gundam is based on Kenya's indigenous Maasai tribe and thus has a distinctive shield and spear to fit the motif. Notably, the Gundam's spear is not an Energy Weapon like the weapons of the Five-Token Band main character's Gundams.

Comic Books

• Black Panther: Deliberately invoked in many versions of Wakanda, where many of their warriors are armed with spears, making them look like backward savages. In truth, their spears are high tech weapons, making for a nasty surprise for any would-be invaders. Of course, this strategy is much less successful against opponents who already know about them (e.g. Klaw), who're much more powerful (e.g. Thanos), or both (e.g. Doctor Doom).

Fan Works

• Dungeon Keeper Ami: As the weapon to arm her unskilled troops with while also lacking even a forging base, Ami uses spears.
• Vow of Nudity: Haara, a jungle warrior who lives alone in the wilderness, wields a handcarved wooden spear as her weapon of choice.

Films — Animated

• Quest for Camelot: Mentioned in the climactic fight, when King Arthur is missing Excalibur and so picks up a spear.
  Ruber: A spear! How stone age!
• Tarzan: Tarzan, who was raised by gorillas following the death of his parents and subsequently lives in a pre-Stone Age society as opposed to the late 19th/early 20th Century world outside of the jungle, manages to create a makeshift spear which he uses to get fruit. As an adult, he uses it to defeat the evil leopard Sabor, unknowingly avenging both his birth parents and Kala and Kerchak's son.

Films — Live-Action

• Avatar: The indigenous Na'vi are coded as various native tribes and fittingly their arsenal is made up of simple spears and bows and arrows, which (combined with their size, strength, and connection to the planet) allows them to force the more technologically advanced colonizers off their planet.
• Black Panther (2018):
  • Subverted and inverted by the spears wielded as the National Weapon of the Dora Milaje, which may seem outwardly archaic in a world with 21st Century modern weaponry (And Wakanda secretly being the most technologically advanced nation on Earth) but are actually made of vibranium, telescope down for easy carrying, can discharge electrical energy out of their blunt end to stun people, and are capable of interfacing with sonic technology. Okoye even makes a point out of considering firearms primitive weapons in comparison.
  • Played straight with the Jabari Tribe, a separatist faction of Wakandans who eschew Vibranium-based technology and live essentially as Luddites compared to the rest of the nation. Their primary weapons are simple wooden spears and clubs.
• Heart of Darkness (1958): Kurtz's followers are comprised of half-naked and cannibalistic African tribesmen, who wield spears as part of that image.
• Independence Day: During a celebratory montage showing various countries trying to fight back against the technologically advanced alien threat, we see barefoot, loincloth-wearing African tribesmen waving spears and staffs in celebration as a ship explodes near Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
• Star Wars: The Ewoks, one of the numerous sentient species of the Forest Moon of Endor, have a Stone Age level of technology and use wooden spears with stone tips as one of their primary weapons.

Literature

• The Dreamside Road: Over half of Maros' Liberty Corps shock forces are made up of spearmen, as ammunition is hard to come by after destabilization.
• Star Wars Legends: The Myneyrsh are a sentient species native to the planet Wayland who are at a roughly Neolithic level of technology and use simple stone spears as their main weapons apart from bows and daggers. When Human Republic colonists first arrived on the planet, they are able to dominate both them and their Psadan rivals thanks to their more advanced technology, but due to an archiving error they were forgotten about, and due to their inability to maintain said weaponry were eventually brought down to the same tech levels as those they subjugated.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: The Exillons, introduced in "Death to the Daleks", are an alien species that once had a technologically advanced spacefaring empire, but transformed into a pre-industrial tribal society after their great city drained the energy out of all their advanced technology. By the time the Doctor and the Daleks encounter them, their weaponry is limited to rocks and spears, but it's not as much of an issue initially due to the city's energy field preventing the latter's otherwise hyperlethal lasers from working.
• Tarzan has a television series from 1966 starring Ron Ely in the title role. This Tarzan left civilization to return to the comforts of the jungle. However, greedy poachers and other nogoodniks would try to exploit the land and its riches, so Tarzan would have to thwart them. One or two villains were no match for Tarzan alone, but multiples with firearms meant bringing in a tribe of natives, complete with spears, torches, and warpaint, to outnumber them. Rifles may be greater than spears, but "bigger army diplomacy" means the villains won't survive a shootout, so they surrender instead.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: Spears are considered "simple" weapons that take significantly less training to use compared to swords, battle axes, or other weapons of war. They're often used as the weapon-of-choice of "primitive" humanoids that lack significant metal-working ability or by characters who aren't trained warriors. Goblins, for example, are regularly depicted as using spears since unlike more martial humanoid races like orcs or hobgoblins, goblins are more prone to living as scavengers and have only the crudest metal-working ability, so spears are much easier for them to fashion.

Video Games

• Age of Empires I: Stone Age Villagers hunt wild animals by throwing spears at them and likewise use fishing spears. Note that these are the only times spears are used before the Bronze Age in-game.
• ARK: Survival Evolved: The stone spear is the first weapon the player can make and is used to reflect how the survivors start at a stone age level of development. As the player progresses, they are able to create more advanced weapons and are typically expected to abandon spears in favor of more powerful, technologically advanced late-game weapons.
• Civilization: From the third game onward, spearmen are among the first combat units that civs can obtain in the Ancient Era, requiring only one or two advances on the Tech Tree to unlock. They can persist through the Classical Era but are deprecated by the Medieval Era.
  Civilopedia: At some point in the prehistory of civilization, some Neolithic warrior decided his club would be more efficient if he sharpened the end of it.
• In Conqueror's Blade, most of the peasant and militia units use rudimentary spears, pikes, or javelins. In keeping with this trope, spears get increasingly rarer the higher up the rank tree you go, being exchanged for more exotic polearms like halberds, glaives, or modao.
• The Elder Scrolls: The series has Rieklings, diminutive goblin-ken that live in clans, are highly aggressive to anyone not themselves, are said to lack much in the way of culture, and are considered little more than beasts carrying weapons by most Nords (With the few who can say anything intelligible in Cyrodilic tending to have simplistic vocabularies). Their primary weapons are small wooden spears with metal tips. In Morrowind's Bloodmoon expansion, their small spears are used by the Player Character as short blades while in Skyrim's Dragonborn DLC, they are launched like arrows.
• Far Cry Primal: Takkar, a caveman of the Wenja tribe, wields wooden spears with flint-knapped heads as weapons.
• Fallout: In Fallout 2 and in the game lore, the spear is a typical weapon of tribals (possibly including your character at the beginning of the game), whose prominent members have stereotypically native trappings and live a more subsistence-based lifestyle compared to other more technologically advanced Wasteland factions such as the NCR or Brotherhood of Steel. For comparison, Fallout: New Vegas arms its tribals with a much wider array of weapons, and the spear is much less prominent among them.
• Fear & Hunger: The Cavedwellers are a race of monstrous tribesmen found in the Mines. While they were once human, a cave-in ultimately forced them to mutate themselves into a race not even capable of speaking human language. Within their settlement, there exist several members of their kind who act as Elite Mooks, each wielding spears capable of inflicting the Bleeding and Poison status effects in combat, compared to the small rocks used by everyone else.
• Final Fantasy XIV: Discussed. During the Lancer and Carpenter quests, it's pointed out that the weapons wielded by lancers were originally born out of the primitive fishing and hunting tools used at the dawn of civilization. The harpoons once used for fetching food were gradually adapted into tools of war with more complex and effective techniques. The player has access to several of these primitive-looking harpoons that are usually made from the shells of animals.
• Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards: Yariko is a caveman-esque enemy whose sole weapon are wooden spears that they throw at Kirby.
• League of Legends: Nidalee, the "Bestial Huntress", is a Jungle Princess initially characterized by her connection to the wild, which is signified by her use of a spear as her main weapon. Though the "primitive" elements of her character have been toned down over time, both to mitigate the problematic parts of her archetype and to accentuate her magical nature as a shapeshifter.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: While just about every group in Hyrule capable of wielding weapons has at least one type of native polearm, the -blin enemies have the simplest cultures and the most crude examples by extension:
    • The Bokoblins are depicted as amongst the most primitive of Hyrule's humanoid non-boss monsters, living in simple camps at a roughly Stone Age level of technology, and wear nothing but skull necklaces, caveman-print sashes, and loincloths. Their primary native melee weapons apart from simple Boko Clubs are Boko Spears which are little more than sharpened sticks carved from tree branches at their base level, with the stronger variants reinforced with bone.
    • Moblins are savage brutes generally depicted as the least developed of Ganon's humanoid minions, with a similar caveman aesthetic of loincloths and strips of cloth to wear. Unlike even the Stone Age-level Bokoblins, Moblins don't make camps and lack the ability to cook as their smaller brethren do. Save for when they live in mixed groups of monsters, Moblins live as essentially dangerous wild animals that are capable of using weapons. One of the two native weapons archetypes of the Moblins apart from heavy wooden clubs are long Moblin Spears crudely whittled out of tree limbs and adorned with bones and horns to make them stronger. While they do some decent damage, their sloppy and unsophisticated construction means that they're fairly fragile. In battle, spear-carrying Moblins favor headlong point-first charges and crude but powerful swinging attacks.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Horriblins are Maniac Monkeys that wield spears fused with second spears allowing them to attack from a distance as they cling to the ceilings of their caves. They're portrayed as even more primitive than their other -blin relatives returning from Breath of the Wild, wearing ragged shorts and a few leather straps and living in "camps" that are little more than hoards of scavenged loot.
• Resident Evil 5: The Wetlands Majini wear grass skirts and wield spears, bows, and wooden shields like stereotypical African natives, unlike those in the city or the firearms-wielding soldiers, due to their Plagas infection causing them to revert back to the ways of their ancestors.
• Spore: Throwing spears are the ranged weapon option in the Tribal Stage, which as its name suggests, revolves around a hunter-gatherer Stone Age society.
• Star Fox Adventures: The LightFoot tribe are based on stereotypical natives, and are notably the only dinosaur tribe who uses spears, with the also weapon-using SharpClaw tribe preferring spiked clubs and axes.
• Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos: The Noble Savage Horde uses spears for its main ground and air-ranged attackers, compared to the Night Elves' bows, Alliance's arquebus/magic hammers, or the Undead's Spider Swarm.

Web Comics

• TwoKinds: The primitive-seeming keidrans are often seen wielding serrated spears. However, upon inspection, these are clearly metalwork rather than knapped flint (the serrations are drawn out of the metal like claws, and moreover only appear on one side), and are fastened to the haft with a pin-and-cup attachment rather than sinew lashing. Despite this obvious craftsmanship, no keidran is seen with swords or halberds (they use nothing larger than a dagger made with a similar technique to the spearheads), pinning down a "primitive" aesthetic.

Web Original

• Hamster's Paradise: This is Zigzagged in how it is used. Spears as a whole are actually used as an indicator of intelligence and advancement as any animal that uses them is noted to be exceptionally cunning, but amongst the sapient species, how the spears are crafted are used to show how advanced they are. With the first sophont species, the harmsters, the savannah and mountain harmsters use simple spears made by chewing a point into a piece of wood or animal bone, whereas the tundra harmsters are able to craft much more complex weaponry, including more advanced spears made with flint or ivory. This greater level of advancement allows the tundra harmsters to conquer and destroy their relatives.

Western Animation

• Futurama: In "Mother's Day", Mom makes all the machines in the world turn against humans, forcing them to return to the basics of living. During this time, Professor Farnsworth shows off his "new invention" — a stick with a sharpened stone tied to it.
• Jonny Quest: "Pursuit of the Po-Ho" has Doctor Emil Hartman, and later Doctor Benton Quest, be captured by the primitive Po-Ho tribe of the Amazon basin. The prisoners are used in sport, in which tribesmen throw their spears at the men, aiming to come as close as possible without inflicting damage. The last spear thrown grazes Benton's shirt collar.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "A Dog and Pony Show", the Diamond Dogs, goblin-like brutes who live in rough underground tunnels, speak like Gollum, and have little visible culture outside of obsessively hoarding gems, are armed with rough spears consisting of pointy rocks tied to sticks.
• Primal (2019): Spear, a caveman who mostly communicates in grunts and screams, uses a wooden spear with a stone tip as his primary weapon apart from clubs and rocks.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Talz are a pre-spaceflight race organized into tribes led by chieftains, are heavily indigenous-coded, and are initially considered little more than unintelligent savages by the Pantorans who've come to colonize their planet. As part of that image, their primary weapons are wooden spears with bone tips.

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