I know one can delete all documents from a certain type via deleteByQuery.
Example:
curl -XDELETE \'http://localhost:9200/twitter/tweet/_query\' -d \
(Reputation not high enough to comment) The second part of John Petrone's answer works - no query needed. It will delete the type and all documents contained in that type, but that can just be re-created whenever you index a new document to that type.
Just to clarify:
$ curl -XDELETE 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/tweet'
Note: this does delete the mapping! But as mentioned before, it can be easily re-mapped by creating a new document.