This hafted diorite adze is from New Guinea. The precise provenance of the artefact is unknown, but the nature of the hafting is similar to that used by people living in the highlands on the upper Sepik River of eastern New Guinea and adjacent regions to the west.
Visit the online Museum of Stone Tools to learn more about New Guinea hafted stone axes and adzes.
See the annotations for technological details about this stone tool.
This hafted adze is likely from the upper Sepik River region of eastern New Guinea. The stone is lenticular in cross section with rounded lateral sides. It appears to have been made on a freshly-fractured slab or flake of diorite, rather than a river cobble, and was initially shaped by percussion flaking. This was followed by grinding focused on preparing the cutting edge and rounding the sides. The cutting edge is approximately centred rather than offset towards one face, and without the handle, the stone would be classified by archaeologists as an ‘axe’.
The stone is hafted directly onto a footed handle cut from the trunk and side branch of a tree. A soft organic spacer was placed onto the foot prior to placing the stone, and the spacer was bound in place with a strip of bark run through a split in the foot. The bark was wrapped around the front of the spacer, obscuring the material. Spacers are unusual on hafted stone adzes from New Guinea and it may have been used to adjust the attack angle of the cutting edge relative to the handle and foot. It is possible that the handle was originally made for a different stone. After the spacer was secured, the stone was placed on top and affixed in place by a plaited wrapping made from split vine. The plaiting technique is typical for adzes from the upper Sepik region, although normally a ring is plaited and slid over the foot and then brought forward over a cover piece and stone. On this adze, the plaiting was done directly onto the handle without a cover over the stone. The handle is heavily polished from use.
Thick yellowish glue can be seen around the stone at its insertion point into the handle, indicating that a collector has glued the stone into place in the relatively recent past.
You can learn more New Guinea hafted adzes here, and this report describes how these stone adzes were used.
New Guinea
New Guinea is the second-largest island in the world, separated from Australia by the 150 km-wide Torres Strait. It lies just south of the equator within the tropical rain belt, and the location near the equator and extensive tropical rainfall gives the island a warm, humid climate suitable for intensive agriculture. A dramatic spine of mountains—the New Guinea Highlands—extends from east to west down the centre of the island, rising up to 4884 metres (16,023 feet), with the tallest peaks covered in equatorial glaciers. The many large, rugged highland valleys and rivers support most of the traditional New Guinea Indigenous groups, numbering nearly 3 million people.
The island’s south side is marked by the vast southern lowlands, drained by the Digul and Fly rivers, among others. To the north of the highlands is the northern lowlands, drained by the Mamberamo and Sepik rivers and other smaller systems. These lowland areas are covered in rainforest and extensive wetlands, and among the largest mangrove swamps in the world occur at the mouths of the rivers that drain them.
New Guinea is resource-rich and geographically complex, and intensive occupation and garden agriculture from the Pleistocene to the present day has led to extensive cultural differentiation. A study in 1999 found that 1109 languages were spoken on the island, making New Guinea the most linguistically diverse region in the world—nearly as many distinct languages are spoken there as in North and South America combined.
Prior to about 8000 years ago, sea levels were much lower, and New Guinea was connected to the Australian continent as the northern part of the paleocontinent of Sahul. Sahul was first colonised ca. 50,000 years ago, and perhaps as early as 65,000 years ago, by modern humans migrating through the Indonesian archipelago of Wallacea. Computer modelling has suggested that these colonisers may have landed on New Guinea before moving southward into what was to become the Australian continent.
Archaeological sites dating up to 49,000 BP have been discovered in the Ivane Valley in the New Guinea Highlands overlooking a swamp near Kosipe Mission in the eastern part of the island. Flaked-stone axes with notches for hafting dating prior to 38,000 BP were recovered from uplifted coastal terraces at Bobongara on the Huon Peninsula, also in eastern New Guinea. People in the Ivane Valley during were hunting small game during this time, and procuring and processing yams and pandanus nuts. The tree line was pushed lower during the colder conditions of the Last Glacial Maximum, and people moved to coastal parts of the island.
The climate began warming at the end of the ice age, and people once again began to intensively exploit plant resources in this highland region. At Kuk Swamp in the Waghi Valley in eastern Indonesia, plants were deliberately planted in garden plots on wetland margins some 10,000 years ago. By 7800 BP people were extensively modifying upland valleys through management of the forests by clearing them. They also used fire as a land-management tool. Around 6900 years ago the inhabitants began building mounded gardens to better control soil moisture in these wet tropical conditions. This strategy was elaborated by the construction of ditch networks by about 4300 BP. Within these contexts, people practiced purposeful selection of the more productive plants in their gardens, leading to a fully-developed agricultural system. New Guinea is recognised by archaeologists of one of the world’s independent centres of agricultural origins. Important food crops domesticated in New Guinea during this period include bananas, taro, various yams, winged beans, pandanus, and sugarcane.
Around 3500 years ago, Austronesian language speakers migrated from Taiwan and southern China and arrived in New Guinea. The Austronesian influence was significant, particularly in coastal areas around the western part of the island. The languages spoken there today are Austronesian in origin. Austronesian influence also filtered through to parts of the Highlands, although most languages there remained indigenous Papuan. By 600 years ago the western part of the island was integrated into the Java-based Majapahit Empire, and a thriving centre of trade developed on the Onin peninsula, with traders (and plunderers) arriving from eastern Indonesia, Ceram, Goram, Ternate, and Tidore. Later traders included Makassans, Buginese, Arabs, and Chinese.
Europeans from Portugal and Spain began exploring the New Guinea coast in the 1500s, followed soon after by the Dutch, who established the Dutch East India Company, or VOC. The Dutch, British, and Germans divided the island into colonies; Germany lost their colony to Britain in World War I and the British gave their colony to Australia. In the aftermath of World War II, the Netherlands and Australia lobbied for the eastern and western halves of the island to be united and given independence, but this was resisted by the USA and Indonesia. The eastern half was granted independence from Australia in 1975 and the western half was given to Indonesia in 1969. The Free Papua Movement was established in 1963 to gain independence of western New Guinea from Indonesia, and a low-level insurrection continues there to the present day.
European colonisation of New Guinea gained momentum at about the same time that the study of anthropology and ethnology were emerging as scholarly disciplines, and the prospect of recording previously-unknown Indigenous peoples attracted researchers from the late 1800s, sometimes sponsored by major museums. This sponsorship resulted in an emphasis on collecting objects, particularly wood carvings. As these objects began arriving in Europe, the aesthetic sense underlying them inspired the abstract turn of avant-gardé artists such as Picasso and Matisse. The European and North American demand for objects grew exponentially through the 1920s and became particularly intense after World War II, with hundreds of thousands of objects taken from villages in eastern New Guinea and exported to museums and private collectors overseas.
By the 1950s in eastern New Guinea, many objects made pre-contact had been taken from villages and local artists began making new ones—both in traditional styles and in new styles more suited to European sensibilities—to sell to collectors and tourists. In western New Guinea, one estimate is that from 1984 to 1990, some 25,000 traditional hafted stone adzes and axes were purchased as souvenirs from highland groups. The trade in wood carvings and other objects continues to be an import part of the cash economy across New Guinea today. Many hafted stone axes in museums are either from the traditional stone axe-using period (which continues to the recent past in highland areas of western New Guinea) or were made with pre-contact stone axes scavenged and put in new hafts. From the 1950s in the Mt Hagen area of the eastern highlands, ceremonial axes were made for tourists and collectors—with modern-made axe heads and modified hafting methods. Adzes were made in the 1990s in western Indonesia to satisfy the same demand, with stone axe heads made using machinery and then mounted into handles using traditional methods.
The continuation of stone technology late into the 20th Century (and into the 2000s in some regions) meant that stone tool using in a horticultural society could be described by researchers using the latest scientific methods. Because of this, relatively detailed accounts of stone adze and axe technology were made from fieldwork beginning in the late 1930s (for example, Beatrice Blackwood’s account of stone tool-making among the Angu people on the Watut River of eastern New Guinea), but these accounts became more numerous from ca. 1960-1990 as colonial control was established in remote regions and travel for non-Indigenous researchers became safer. In particular, accounts by archaeologists Bud Hampton (Culture of Stone), Pierre and Anne-Marie Pétrequin (Ecology of a Tool) and John Burton (Axe Makers of the Wahgi) are the most thorough descriptions we have of stone tool use in agricultural societies. More recently, the highland regions have become largely closed to researchers in both western and eastern New Guinea, as armed groups are active in these areas.
New Guinea Highlands
Europeans first entered the high-elevation savannahs along the mountainous spine of New Guinea in the 1930s and surprised the world by finding combined populations of over one million people living there. Although European colonisers in the 19th Century could see the highland mountains from the sea, they didn’t realise that hundreds of thousands of people lived in those surrounding montane valleys.
Australians eventually arrived in the Waghi Valley in eastern New Guinea in 1933, prospecting for gold. The miners immediately built an airstrip and flew in enormous large numbers of pearl shells and other wealth objects to pay local workers to extract the nuggets from the alluvial gravels. This seriously disrupted the local and regional economy, and the important economic role of stone axes became rapidly altered.
Australia closed the region for 10 years after the murder of two missionaries in 1934 and reprisal killings by Australian administrators, called ‘kiaps’, and their native policemen through the 1940s. Despite this, some 10 missions were opened by Christian groups across this part of the highlands by 1935. The official reopening ten years after the end of the war—with the first road to the Mt Hagen region finished in 1950—saw an incursion by government workers, Christian missionaries, farmers intending to establish plantations and sheep farms, and various other merchants.
The Baliem Valley in the western (Indonesian) part of the island was entered in 1938, but in contrast to the Highlands to the east, it was decades before sustained outside influence affected these groups. This was due to the greater remoteness of the area, the nature of governance by Indonesia, and the slow-paced introduction of Dutch and Indonesian administrative control. Hence traditional stone axe-making was extensively practiced at least through the 1990s and may exist in some areas today. It is estimated that there may be as many as 40 Indigenous groups in the highlands of the western part of the island that have yet to have direct or sustained contact with outsiders. The region has seen significant conflict with the Indonesian military; in 1977 Indonesia bombed and napalmed the Baliem Valley, with about half of the villages burned. Thousands of people were killed and thousands more fled eastward into Papua New Guinea, leading to accusations of genocide against the Indonesian government by civil rights groups.
The linguistic and culturally diverse highland peoples in eastern and western New Guinea practice horticulture based on patchworks of gardens and pig farming. Sweet potato is the principal crop, augmented by taro, bananas, and sago. Sweet potato originated from South America and is thought to have been introduced to the highlands less than 500 years ago, replacing the dominant role of less-productive taro in the diet. The introduction of sweet potato resulted in dramatic changes to highland society, providing a staple resource encouraging population growth and stimulating changes in many cultural practices, including the emergence of the ‘big man’ social institution.
Stone tools had mostly disappeared from coastal groups in the late 1800s and early 1900s after decades of trade with Europeans for steel tools—and even earlier in western New Guinea as a result of trade with Indonesia—but steel tools were unknown or mostly unavailable to these inland people. Stone axes and adzes were used daily in clearing trees and brush to maintain and expand the garden landscape. They also used stone tools to make wood structures and artworks, to wield as weapons in warfare, to amass and distribute as wealth and prestige goods, and to carry as ceremonial objects and signatures of cultural affiliations.
