This basalt 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.

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The small stone axe in this model was made by bifacial hard-hammer percussion.  The starting blank is unclear, although a technologically very similar axe from the same area was made on a large basalt flake blank.  The flakes mostly terminated at or short of the centreline, resulting in a thick lenticular cross section.  The lateral edges were left sharp, but the butt end was rounded and shaped by on-edge hammer dressing.  The butt may have also been lightly abraded.  A relatively narrow cutting edge was ground onto one end of the tool.  The surfaces are degraded by chemical weathering, which has removed the edge-grinding striations.

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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.