Quartzite grooved axe from near Bourke in western New South Wales.  The original axe is heavily patinated, and it was collected and reworked in later prehistory.  The stone is from the traditional country of the Ngemba people.

See the annotations for technological details about this stone tool.

---

The quartzite axe in this model was probably made from a water-rolled cobble.  The surfaces are heavily patinated by bleaching, and the original manufacture techniques are difficult to determine.  No clear flake scars are present, suggesting that it was pecked to shape prior to grinding.   A shallow groove was pecked around most of the axe’s diameter to receive a wrap-around wood handle.  The axe is short relative to its thickness, and it may have been resharpened many times prior to its original discard.  The axe was rediscovered and collected after the patination developed—after hundreds or perhaps thousands of years since it was first manufactured.  The new owner removed flakes from the ground cutting edge by percussion flaking, and heavily reworked the axe’s butt end, perhaps by using it as a hammerstone.  This damage removed part of the pecked groove.

---

The earliest-known edge-ground stone axes in the world are found in archaeological sites in Australia, and are over 40,000 years old.  They were made continuously from the earliest occupation of the continent through to the recent past, and are still made in New Guinea today. Stone axes were made in vast numbers during the Middle and Late Holocene period, from about 10,000 years ago, and Aboriginal people developed extensive trade networks for axes made of particularly prized stones.  The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, writing in 1933 about ceremonial trade on the Daly River of the Northern Territory, said that ‘there can be nothing more useless in the native economy than a pile of [stone axes] with nowhere to send them.’  Axes were also symbolically and ritually important, with story sites for axe quarries and mythological figures wielding stone axes as weapons.  For instance, Namarrkon, an Ancestral Being in Arnhem Land in Northern Australia, uses stone axes affixed to his head, elbows, and knees to create the intense lightning in storms that signal the arrival of the monsoon.  Axes were integrated within the cultural system in the historic period, and axe manufacture and use was embedded in various social roles.  Stone axes in the recent past were usually mounted onto thin wood handles and affixed with plant resin or native bees wax.