Here in the US we teach LE and armed civvie types the '21 foot rule'.
Briefly it states that an assailant armed with an edged weapon who is within 21 feet of someone with a holstered firearm will kill that person every single time.
There's just no way one can draw a firearm and bring it to bear before the assailant splits you from 'the nave to the chops'.
I've seen it demonstrated time and again and it never fails to open the eyes of someone who hasn't seen it demonstrated.
Not a bad accomplishment for what was essentially a stone-age and savage culture
People often mistake 'primitive' for 'stupid' when there's absolutely no correlation between the two. Simply because they lacked technology doesn't mean they couldn't use other means to overcome their environment.
Or come up with some truly wickedly effective weapons.
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> People often mistake 'primitive' for 'stupid' when there's absolutely no correlation between the two. Simply because they lacked technology doesn't mean they couldn't use other means to overcome their environment.
>
> Or come up with some truly wickedly effective weapons.
That is an interesting and important point. Couple more examples:
Maori never discovered metal, but they did discover that greenstone (jade, or "pounamu" as they call it) is harder than steel, reasonably easy to work and carve, reasonably plentiful particularly in South Island, and holds a wickedly sharp edge. It's also lighter than steel but heavier than wood. In short, a perfect warmaking material: like titanium in some ways.
It can be made both into edged weapons of incredible strength, or into blunt instruments to thunk people with. Or combinations of the two. The "mere" (pronounced almost like "Mary" except with a soft "e" at the end, rather than a hard "y") is a good example. Most often now used ceremonially or for "kapa haka" (competitive dances) and kept blunt, it is still plenty heavy enough to give someone a bad headache or skull fracture.
Whalebone was used much the same way as greenstone. A whalebone "patu" was sharp, it was also a blunt instrument, and it had a wicked "hook" built into one of its edges. This was, I've been told, to rip out the enemy's rib cage at the solar plexus, or to rip off the enemy's goolies with a single nasty sweep. Ouch! Diabolically clever. Again, perfectly fit-for-purpose.
As with all of these weapons, there are Maori martial arts surrounding their correct use. Often now, tourists get to see some of this during a "kapa haka" performance, little realizing that they're not all just fun-and-games: only a tiny taste of a fairly complex warmaking capability.
Here is a link with a few photos of weapons: http://maorisource.com/MaoriWeapons.html
(It calls the taiaha a "long club", too: I have been brought to task several times by Maori for making the same mistake! It is correctly used, not as a club, but as I described in a previous post.)
Equally interesting, the Maori invented complex trench warfare long, long before it became fashionable in Europe. The earliest ones date from Maori's first settlements in NZ, circa AD900.
Their fortifications, called "pa", were complex and often quite geometrically beautiful. With plenty of nasty surprises in store for enemy infantry: dead ends, trap doors, false passages that eventually lead to steep passages that eventually lead to near-vertical passages that take the enemy plunging headlong off a cliff...
(the classic "long, slippery slope!)
Often they were built around natural landforms: "Lion Rock" in Piha is a good example, so are most of the extinct volcanoes in Auckland like Mt Eden. But often they were just built on hi ground, carved into the soil.
No wonder the British troops had difficulty defeating the Maori (which they never actually achieved, completely) -- the Maori were using a superior trench warfare technology, as longstanding experts, that wouldn't come into vogue in Europe until mid-18th Century and would only become obsolete during WW-I some seventy years later. The British would not have been exposed to this type of warfare, or at least not for long, anywhere else in the Empire. And, by this time, Maori were also accumulating muskets, becoming expert shots.
Their war canoes were very, very seaworthy: as well as being intricately carved works of art.
They figured out amazing poultices and medicines based on NZ plants to heal war wounds: some of these are still used by NZ athletes, and they seem to work.
They were cannibals (there wasn't much else by way of protein available in NZ before the European settlers introduced cattle, and not many of their tribes were adept at fishing on any large scale) and they developed fairly sophisticated technologies for cooking and preserving their dinner.
("Cannibalism and ugly weapons! Ewwww Yuck!" we may say, but that is from our Western perspective. In fact, Maori were *the experts* of ad-hoc, improvised warmaking technology, and they improvised and adapted to suit their specific needs and challenges. Pretty clever indeed.)