This basalt stone axe is from 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 stone axe in this model was made on a water-rolled cobble by hard-hammer percussion flaking.  The cobble may have been split first, although subsequent reduction has eliminated the evidence for this.  Two large negative flake end-thinning scars are on the non-cortical face.  Both propagated deep into the stone and substantially thinned the blank.  They propagated over half the length of the axe blank.  The blank’s sharp edges were rounded by a pecking technique applied straight-into the edge.  This was followed by expert edge-grinding at one end of the blank.

See the annotations for technological details about this stone tool.

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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.