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 agriculture that required stone axes and adzes for daily tasks. Due to their importance, axes and adzes were also incorporated into wealth exchanges and ceremonies.

First-hand descriptions by explorers and anthropologists in the New Guinea highlands, from the 1930s through the 1990s, are the most thorough descriptions we have of stone axe use in living societies. We can see through these accounts how stone axes and adzes were integrated with wood handles to produce a highly effective stone-based technology. This gives us insights into how similar stone technologies were once practiced elsewhere, and how the stone parts found in the archaeological record may have functioned within wood handles that no longer survive.

The ways that stone axes and adzes were affixed to wood handles (‘hafted’) varied by region across New Guinea. The handles can be divided into two basic forms: a ‘simple’ straight handle, with the stone mounted directly or indirectly through a hole (or ‘mortise’) carved into it, and a ‘footed’ handle, with the stone lashed directly or indirectly onto a foot that projected away from the handle at an acute angle.

Simple mortise hafting was prevalent in the rainforests of southwestern New Guinea and extended into the highlands in some parts of western New Guinea. Since this hafting does not involve a foot—the stone was mounted directly into the handle—relatively long, robust stone axes were necessary to ensure the cutting edge was sufficiently distant from the handle. The stone axes were narrower at the butt end than in the middle, so that they wedged into the mortise with use. The wood handle in the area around the mortise was thick to withstand this wedging force.

An innovation to the simple mortise handle was devised in areas along New Guinea’s north and south coasts  and rainforest hinterlands.  In this more complex form of mortise hafting, the stone was affixed into the end of a tapered two-piece wooden clamp, and the clamp was inserted into the mortise.  Like the taper of a stone axe, the taper of the clamp caused it to wedge into the mortise with use.  An advantage of this method of hafting is that small stone axes could be inserted into the clamp.  The clamp could also be rotated to change the angle of the cutting edge, discussed below.

The most common haft design across New Guinea is called a ‘footed’ handle by the archaeologist Eleanor Crosby, and a ‘bent’ handle by the archaeologists Pierre and Anne-Marie Pétrequin. The handle was carefully selected from the trunk of a tree (often a Nothofagus, or southern beech) where a branch extended outward at an upward angle from the vertical trunk. The tree part was cut and shaped to receive the stone—this part is called the handle’s ‘foot’—and the branch became the handle. The curvature of the handle was sometimes adjusted by applying heat and bending, as preferred by some woodworkers, but the overall bent shape was configured by the natural growth of the tree.

The most common footed handle was made by binding the stone adze directly onto the foot. The foot was usually hollowed out to fit the contours of the stone, and sometimes a separate cover—such as another piece of wood, was placed over the top of the stone before lashing. Simple footed handles like this dominated the adze hafting methods in most of the highland regions. It was suited particularly well to long stone adzes.

Lashing often involved tightly binding strips of cane, bark, or braided fibre cord around the stone and the foot. A softer material such as bark or wood slivers were sometimes placed over the adze to provide better purchase for the binding.

The binding was often done in a figure-8 pattern, producing geometric V-shaped patterns when viewed from the top. The chosen binding materials, and the patterns created by different approaches to binding, frequently denoted the cultural ties of the adze-maker.

Another type of footed handle was made by binding the stone adze to the foot using a plaited ring of split cane. This method was common across the eastern highlands and adjacent areas to the north. It could be used to secure small stone adzes. The plaited ring—a type of cylindrical braid—was often relatively short relative to the length of the foot. Because of this, the binding can appear less robust than that seen on lashed adzes, but the plaited ring was highly effective. The percussive force of using the adze pushed the stone further under the ring, and the inertia of the ring caused it to move further forward onto the stone and reverse-tapered foot. These forces worked in tandem to ensure a tight bind with the foot. It is possible that the plaited design worked somewhat like ‘finger trap’ toys, as a cylindrical braid will automatically tighten onto objects (i.e., the adze) pulled out from under it.

The ceremonial axes made in the Massim region of eastern New Guinea are an elaborated variant of the simple footed handle.  A recess was carved into the side of the foot to receive the stone blade.  The handles were carefully carved with curvilinear designs and stylised frigate bird motifs.  Modern art historians admire the artistry of the carving, but the Massim people considered the stone far more valuable than the wood handle.

A third type of footed handle is similar to the mortise haft on a simple handle, but instead of being inserted into a mortise, the clamp holding the adze was instead lashed directly to the foot. The clamp was usually bound onto the foot separately from the lashing that held the clamp together. Clamps were sometimes bound together over the axe using cylindrical braided rings. The clamp-and-foot hafting method was particularly popular in the eastern highlands.

The ceremonial axes made in the Mt Hagen region are a complex variant of the clamp-and-foot axe. In this case an elaborate curved wooden clamp is carved with a projecting ‘balancer’ at one end, and a recess for the flat-sectioned stone axe at the other end. The axe is affixed to the clamp with a cylindrical plaited ring, and the clamp is tied to the footed handle with bark. The lashing is then covered in intricately-woven cane, which is mainly decorative but also serves to protect the lashing. The woven cane was sometimes continued onto the balancer. The Mt Hagen ceremonial axe is an iconic image of traditional material culture and appears on the New Guinea 2 kina banknote. A version of these ceremonial axes were popular tourist items in the Mt Hagen highlands, and were made in large numbers from the 1950s-1990s.

Many New Guinea woodworkers mounted the stone so that the cutting edge was rotated at an angle to the handle.  In the case of axes, this meant mounting the stone so that the cutting edge was not quite parallel to the handle, and in the case of adzes, this meant mounting the stone so that is was not quite at right-angles to the handle.  This ‘angle of attack’ was easily adjustable in the clamp-style axes and adzes, as the clamp could be rotated to finely adjust the angle.  On museum specimens, the final angle of the edge, prior to the adze being collected, was often oriented about 50-75 degrees to the handle.  The adjustable angle of attack was particularly useful in hollowing out the difficult-to-reach areas inside dugout canoes, drums, and other types of wood carvings.  The direction of the rotation, to the left or right, depends on the handedness of the user.

References

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Burton, J. (1984). Axe makers of the Wahgi: Pre-colonial industrialists of the Papua New Guinea highlands. PhD dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

Crosby, E. (1973). A comparative study of Melanesian hafted edge-tools and other percussive cutting implements. PhD dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

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