Symbolic Stones

Today we use tools and weapons as symbols of cultural and social identity, and people in the past did likewise with stone tools. Once imbued with symbolic associations, the stone tool’s function often changed significantly.

A variety of ‘prestige’ stone tools can be found in the various categories used to sort the Museum of Stone Tool’s 3D models. Prestige tools were imbued with symbolic meaning, and were often larger, made of better stone, or were more carefully flaked than their mundane counterparts. In some cases they are designs all of their own, with no equivalent functional tool. Once imbued with symbolic associations, the function of a stone tool often changed significantly, or became irrelevant altogether.

Prestige goods may have been carried as symbols, used to cement trade relations, or were buried with the dead or in ritual caches or hoards. Some archaeologists have proposed that the process of manufacture of prestige stone tools was itself loaded with symbolism, in a manner similar to sword-making in Japan.

Various cultural groups in New Guinea today often carry finely-made stone axes in dances and ritual display. These axes are not intended for use. They also make large, elongated, and carefully ground and polished stones—often decorated with grass skirts and shells, fur, feathers, or pig tusks—to serve as display and exchange stones. In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, large, expertly-flaked stone or glass prestige spearpoints were important commodities in the wunan exchange cycle.

Clovis points made from high-quality stones by expert flintknappers have been found in caches in western North America, dating to ca. 13,000 BP. The famous Wenatchee Clovis cache, discovered in 1987, included dozens of tools, including exceptionally large versions of Clovis points made from semi-translucent chalcedony. In 1874, scores of very large, leaf-shaped bifaces were discovered in a cache near the town of Volgu in France. These bifaces are large, expertly-made versions of similar bifaces from Solutrean sites across the region, dating to ca. 22,000-17,000 BP. Both the Wenatchee and Volgu caches may have been votive offerings, buried for religious reasons without an intention to retrieve them.

Votive offerings made by the Aztecs in Mexico sometimes included bifacial flint knives called Tecpatl. Tecpatl found in the Templo Mayor precinct of Mexico City were affixed with an eye and teeth to imitate a face in profile. The eyes and teeth of a decorated Tecpatl were made from white chert, and the pupil of the eye was a small disc of flaked obsidian. Elaborate chert objects called eccentrics were made by the Mayan people, showing multiple faces in profile spreading from a central tang in an organic, tree-like fashion. They are among the finest examples of the flintknapper’s art.

Besides stone axes, many types of objects used tool-making techniques, such as pecking (or hammer dressing) and grinding to fashion the stone into the desired shape. Many were engraved with meaningful pictures or patterns using stone tools. These sculptural techniques were often used to create animal effigies and geometric objects, and although the iconography of objects from the deep past are lost to us, we can infer that the stylistic conventions were symbolic and reflected the artist’s cultural world-view. Sometimes these sculptural forms were elaborations on utilitarian, everyday tools, such as battle axes in the Neolithic period in Europe, grinding stones in the late prehistory of Costa Rica, and spearthrower weights (‘bannerstones’) from the Late Archaic period in the woodlands of eastern North America. Beads, pendants, and other items of stone jewelry served a symbolic function by sending social cues about a person’s place in society, a role these objects serve to the modern day.