This metasedimentary stone axe is from an axe manufacturing area in the New England Tablelands region of New South Wales.  The area is within the traditional country of the Jukumbal people.

This artefact is cared for on-country west of Inverell by the Jukumbal people.  The artefact was retrieved by Jukumbal representatives and loaned to Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology at the University of New England for 3D modelling, after which it was returned back to its location on-country.

See the annotations for technological details about this stone tool.

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The stone axe in this model was bifacially flaked by hard-hammer percussion.  The stone is metasedimentary in origin and is stained red from being buried in iron-rich soil.  The material is green in colour on a fresh damage scar.  The axe was made on a large flake blank, with the cutting edge at the distal end of the blank.  The lateral edges were flaked semi-invasively on the blank’s dorsal surface, creating a ridge of high mass down the centre of the face.  The mass was partly removed by an end-thinning flake struck from the distal end, which propagated most of the way down the length of the blank.  The proximal end of the blank is more steeply flaked, and this part of the edge was finished with an on-edge pecking technique.  This technique was minimally used on the lateral edges of the blank.  An edge was ground on the distal end of the blank, but most of the ground surfaces—and the entire ground edge—was removed by a large bend-initiated flake which propagated onto the dorsal surface.  This bending scar was likely created by catastrophic failure of the edge during use.

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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.