New Research

Using stone axes and adzes: Insights from New Guinea

In 1952 the Danish archaeologists Johannes Iversen, Jörgen Troels-Smith, and Svend Jörgensen conducted an experiment to better understand how stone axes functioned in Neolithic Europe. The team replicated wood handles based on the Sigerslev axe—an ancient axe found in a Danish bog—and hafted them with archaeological flint axes borrowed from the National Museum in Copenhagen. …

European colonisers first entered the high-elevation savannahs along the mountainous spine of New Guinea in the 1930s. Although explorers in the 19th Century could see the highland mountains from the sea, the colonisers were shocked to find over one million people lived in the surrounding montane valleys. These people practiced a traditional form of garden-based…

An international collaboration between the Tiapapata Art Centre, Puke Ariki, and the Museum of Stone Tools An aspiration of the Museum of Stone Tools is to work with overseas researchers and institutions to produce 3D models of stone tool types that we do not have access to at our home base in regional Australia. One…

The traditional country of the Widi People covers a quarter of a million hectares west of Mackay, Queensland. Widi country includes open sclerophyll woodlands typical for this part of Australia, and large parts of it are covered in silcrete cobbles—a valuable toolmaking stone for the ancestors of the Widi. The European colonisers discovered vast quantities…