The Bloomfield Throwing Knife. Analyzing an Improvised Shuriken to Appreciate the Derived Artifact

Abstract

Once armed with only tooth and nail, humankind has displayed great ingenuity in creating weapons. One class of such artifacts, ‘improvised weapons’, once consisted of such items as a rock or bottle, but in an era of readily available manufactured weapons, now includes items created from spare parts in various environments. Using such a weapon as a case study, this article seeks to explore and analyze the derived artifact and understand it not as a piece of junk, but as a credible design product that provides insight into the designer and the motivations of artifact creation.