PETREQUIN P. et PETREQUIN A.M., 2011.- The twentieth-century polished stone axeheads of New Guinea :...

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Stone Axe Studies III

Stone Axe Studies III TEXT March2011:Layout 1 18/03/2011 13:25 Page i

An offprint from

© Oxbow Books 2011

ISBN 978-1-84217-421-0

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 7The experienced axe. Chronology, condition and context of TRB-axes in western NorwayKnut Andreas Bergsvik and Einar Østmo

Chapter 2 21The Nøstvet AxeHåkon Glørstad

Interlude 1 37

Chapter 3 39The evolution of Neolithic and Chalcolithicwoodworking tools and the intensification of human production: axes, adzes and chiselsfrom the Southern LevantRan Barkai

Chapter 4 55Eclogite or jadeitite: The two colours involved inthe transfer of alpine axeheads in western EuropePierre Pétrequin, Alison Sheridan, Serge Cassen, Michel Errera, Estelle Gauthier,Lutz Klassen, Nicolas le Maux, Yvan Pailler,Anne-marie Pétrequin, Michel Rossy

Interlude 2 83

Chapter 5 85Power tools: Symbolic considerations of stone axe production and exchange in 19th century south-eastern AustraliaAdam Brumm

Chapter 6 99Social and economic organisation of stone axeproduction and distribution in the westernMediterraneanRoberto Risch

Interlude 3 119

Chapter 7 121The felsite quarries of North Roe, Shetland – An overviewTorben Ballin

Chapter 8 131Misty mountain hop: Prehistoric stone workingin south-west WalesTimothy Darvill

Interlude 4 147

Chapter 9 149Production and diffusion of axes in the Seine valleyFrançois Giligny, Françoise Bostyn, Jérémie Couderc, Harold Lethrosne, Nicolas Le Maux, Adrienne Lo Carmine, Cécile Riquier

Chapter 10 167A time and place for the Belmont HoardVin Davis and Mark Edmonds

Interlude 5 187

Chapter 11 189The prehistoric axe factory at Sanganakallu-Kupgal (Bellary District), southern IndiaRoberto Risch, Nicole Boivin, Michael Petraglia, David Gómez-Gras, Ravi Korisettar, Dorian Fuller

Chapter 12 203The ritual use of axesLars Larsson

Interlude 6 215

Chapter 13 217Primary and secondary raw material preferencesin the production of Neolithic polished stone toolsin northwest TurkeyOnur Özbek

Chapter 14 231Stone-working traditions in the prehistoricAegean: The production and consumption of edge tools at Late Neolithic MakriyalosChristina Tsoraki

Interlude 7 245

Chapter 15 247The Mynydd Rhiw quarry site: Recent work and its implicationsSteve Burrow

Chapter 16 261Graig Lwyd (Group VII) assemblages from Parc Bryn Cegin, Llandygai, Gwynedd, Wales – analysis and interpretationJohn Llewellyn Williams, Jane Kenney, Mark Edmonds

Contents

Stone Axe Studies III TEXT March2011:Layout 1 18/03/2011 13:25 Page iii

Interlude 8 279

Chapter 17 281Neolithic polished stone axes and hafting systems: Technical use and social function at the Neolithic lakeside settlements of Chalain and ClairvauxYolaine Maigrot

Chapter 18 295A potential axe factory near Hyssington, Powys:Survey and excavation 2007–08Nigel Jones and Steve Burrow

Chapter 19 309Does size matter? Stone axes from Orkney: their style and depositionAnn Clarke

Interlude 9 323

Chapter 20 325Neolithic ground axe-heads and monuments in WessexDavid Field

Chapter 21 333The twentieth-century polished stone axeheads of New Guinea: why study them?Pierre Pétrequin and Anne-Marie Pétrequin,

Interlude 10 351

Chapter 22 353Neolithic near-identical twins: The ambivalent relationship between ‘factory’ rock and polished stone implementsStephen Briggs

Chapter 23 361Flint axes, ground stone axes and “battle axes” of the Copper Age in the Eastern Balkans(Romania, Bulgaria)Florian Klimscha

Interlude 11 383

Chapter 24 385Stone axes in the Bohemian Eneolithic: Changing forms, context and social significanceJan Turek

Chapter 25 399Changing contexts, changing meanings: Flint axes in Middle and Late Neolithic communities in the northern NetherlandsKarsten Wentink, Annelou van Gijn, David Fontijn

Interlude 12 409

Chapter 26 411Old friends, new friends, a long-lost friend and false friends: Tales from Projet JADEAlison Sheridan, Yvan Pailler, Pierre Pétrequin, Michel Errera

Chapter 27 427The Irish Stone Axe Project: Reviewing progress, future prospectsGabriel Cooney, Stephen Mandal, Emmett O’Keeffe

Interlude 13 443

Stone Axe Studies III TEXT March2011:Layout 1 18/03/2011 13:25 Page iv

At a time in the history of archaeological research when the use of ethnographic analogy in its strict sense is out of fashion, the ethnographic examples from present-day New Guinea haveconsiderable importance for archaeological theory in helping us to understand, from living people, what a polished stone axeheadmight represent.

In using the results of their 21 years of fieldwork in New Guinea, the authors set forth a panorama of different social interpretations of polished stone axeheads, showing how a tool ostensibly for clearing the forest could be used for other, non-utilitarian purposes,and not just in the sphere of commerce: for the accumulation ofwealth, for marriage and death payments, for demonstrating thestatus of important men, for gift exchange and for rituals connectedwith communicating with the spirit world. Thus, the people whomanufacture these axeheads are regarded above all as powerful ritual specialists, allowed to work with raw materials that wereformed at the beginning of the world by Primordial Beings. It is this social and religious significance that lends axeheads their special value, as objects that participate in the material andideological reproduction of these communities of forest farmers.

Such modern ethnographic examples encourage us to reconsider the status and significance of Neolithic polished stone tools, and offer us powerful models to test against the remains of the past.

Pierre Pétrequin

Anne-Marie Pétrequin

The twentieth-centurypolished stone axeheads of New Guinea: why study them?Abstract

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Introduction

Current scientific studies of Neolithic polishedstone axeheads and adze-heads are orientatedin several directions, but are rarely led from thefront. The first of these directions, it wouldappear, is that taken by mineralogists who con-cern themselves with determining the rocktypes from which these blades had been made.They often use a wide range of analytical tech-niques and equipment, as employed in geologyand petrology. The aim is to pinpoint the placeswhere the rocks had been extracted, and toreconstruct the theoretically straight-linemovements taken by the raw material and arti-facts from the source areas to the farthest-flungusers. Within this specialism, which comes fromthe world of natural sciences and tends toignore the social aspects of life, issues ofchronology and the typological classification ofpolished stone industries are given little con-sideration. Instead, it is assumed that some kindof unchanging set of modalities of extraction,manufacture, circulation and use of axeheadshad existed over long periods during theNeolithic: no evolution is envisaged, even overseveral millennia.

A second orientation – in the sense of theword that we are using here – privileges thefunctional aspects of stone tools. This perspec-tive characterizes the work of prehistorianswhose research focuses on technical aspects,on the comparative efficiency of tools madefrom different raw materials. Their work, likethat of the mineralogists, concerns itself withthe conditions of extraction, with the tech-niques used to manufacture axes (flaking, peck-ing, sawing and hafting), and with studyinguse-wear traces. This approach concentrates onrecording diagnostic features relating to ma-nufacture and use, and on reconstructing thechaine opératoire, in order to assess the tech-niques of manufacture and the skill of the stoneaxehead maker. The chronological and socialaspects of the production, exchange and use ofaxeheads usually occupy the hinterland of suchresearch, or are even sometimes considered tobe inaccessible to the prehistorian. One couldcharacterize this axis of research as being basedon an ‘engineering science’ perspective.

Typologists tend to follow a third path, focus-ing on the classification of forms, on chronol-ogy, and on the spatial relationships withartefactual assemblages belonging to specificarchaeological cultures – cultures that are in aconstant state of evolution, changing more orless rapidly. The accent, then, is on instability,on permanent adjustment to change, and on

the transformation of material culture assem-blages according to complex social processeswhose understanding lies in the realm of thesocial sciences. As with all other kinds of arti-facts, then, polished stone tools are regarded asa sign, to be described and interpreted as amarker of particular social phenomena.

One could argue, of course, that these dif-ferent approaches ought to be complementary,covering all the different facets offered by a pol-ished stone axehead. In effect, it is difficult tosee how one could knowingly exclude one orother of these points of view, or privilege oneto the detriment of the others, even if we acceptthat archaeological research tends to be con-ducted within narrow specialisms, given thecomplexity of the scientific methods of analysisthat are involved. But the history of researchshows us that truly interdisciplinary workremains the exception rather than the rule(despite there being a shared vocabulary ofterms): what we see is specialists who eachdefend their very different points of view andoften do not want to consider the others’.

One feature that is common to all these spe-cialist perspectives is the relative weakness ofinterpretative hypotheses about the past.People write about the modalities of axeheadproduction, but do not address the questionsof who did the manufacture, and where, howand why it was done. They write about long-distance transfers (How? To what end? Why?);and about the use of stone axeheads (as what?Utilitarian tools? Social symbols? And whyshould they be used in a particular way?). It istrue that researchers have long acknowledgeda difference between workaday axeheads, madefor chopping down trees and working wood,and the magnificent highly polished exampleswhich are classified as being ‘prestige’, ‘cere-monial’ or ‘ritual’ axeheads – terms which areparticularly vague and of very little heuristicvalue as currently defined. Furthermore, thefoundations of this conventional distinctionbetween utilitarian and non-utilitarian are notalways clear, and might simply be part of ourwestern preoccupation with defining simplebinary oppositions. We tend to avoid con-fronting more complex systems, as can be seenin our approaches to understanding our ownsocieties: we have difficulty in apprehendingthe complexities of how societies operatebecause we are too close to the subject matter,and because the complexities are manifested inbanal ways. In other words, we could say thatresearchers (and we are all researchers) tend tosimplify their studies and their interpretationsas part of an unconscious projection onto the

334 Stone Axe Studies III


past of modern ideas about ‘common sense’behaviour: we judge the past against our owncontemporary ideals and values. If this is a cor-rect reading of the evidence, it seems that weare dealing with an ethnocentric, one-sidedattitude which reduces the quality of researchand of reasoning and fails to capture the com-plexity of different cultures over time. Put dif-ferently, our current scientific approaches reston a narrow comparative ethnography whichis informed by the values of our own westernsocieties and dominated by the enduring andpolitically correct myths of positivism, materi-alism, technology, science, progress, develop-ment et cetera (Pétrequin & Pétrequin 1992).

Long after ethnologists had already done so,various theoreticians of the New Archaeologyschool turned to the study of contemporaryethnographic situations in order to constructpredictive models and to test alternative inter-pretative theories against archaeological evi-dence in their research into the underlyingfactors involved in the functioning of agricul-tural societies. Regarding ground stone axe-heads, let us remember the very interestingtheoretical developments linked to the study oftheir spatial distribution, their mode of transferand their circulation over various distances(among which are the studies of Hodder 1976and of Renfrew, 1975 and 1977). These theoriescontinue to influence notions of exchange thatare used by petrographers and by prehistorianswhen discussing ground stone ‘tools’.Nowadays archaeological model-building hasfallen out of favour – especially in those caseswhere research is undertaken on geographicallydistant cultures, which can be very differentfrom our own. The reason for this is that allkinds of comparative study – and even the ideathat trans-cultural regularities in behaviourcould exist – have fallen out of favour amongmost scientists. This attitude shows thatresearchers who are reluctant to search for ideasand for theoretical insights (i.e. workinghypotheses) in present-day or recent societieshave forgotten that the modest theoretical bag-gage that they bring to the task was itselffounded on ethnographic observations. To usehypotheses that are based on observations ofcontemporary societies is not to say that weshould assume that Neolithic societies inEurope operated in a similar way to our own,or to those of other societies thousands of kilo-metres away, which have followed their owndevelopmental trajectories over time (Pétrequin& Pétrequin 1992).

What interests ethnoarchaeologists above allelse is not, in fact, how an axehead or adze-

head is manufactured or used; these aspectscan be reconstructed, in a reasonably plausiblemanner, using classic methods of technology.Rather, it is the meanings that Neolithic peopleaccorded to their stone tools, and to each stagein the long sequence of manufacture and use:by focusing on these meanings one can try tounderstand what it was about a particular typeof rock that made people go back and re-usefragments of axeheads that had been thrownout as waste, or to polish a long bar of preciousstone to a mirror-like sheen and deposit it ver-tically in a marsh or at the foot of a stele. Whilean understanding of the technology of manu-facture and use may be indispensible fordescribing polished stone axeheads, it cannotequip one to comprehend and explain thedynamic of these objects in terms of their socialrole, where the idea that people created them-selves through their axeheads is a fundamentalconcept.

Several examples taken from our 21 ethnoar-chaeological missions in New Guinea will serveto illustrate what we mean. We shall seek toshow that, in contemporary forest-dwellinghorticultural societies, axes and adzes play acentral role in the functioning of society. Wecannot dissociate technical acts from ritual acts;to do so would be to render incomprehensiblethe role of socially valorised stone tools(Lemonnier 1986), whose status and biogra-phies are founded on ideal representations ofsociety (Godelier 1996).

Production of polished stoneaxeheads: factors determining the choice of raw material

Over the last forty years, New Guinea has rep-resented an extraordinary example of whereforest-dwelling farmers have still been under-taking their cyclical forest clearance exclusivelythrough the use of axes and adzes with pol-ished stone blades. However, one should addthat these communities have not beenuntouched by the outside world during thistime: the first contacts were with gold prospec-tors, explorers, soldiers and missionaries(Blackwood 1950; Hughes 1977; Le Roux 1950),so that by the time scientific observers arrived,their observations would already have beenpartly biased by these prior contacts. Amongthe Baruya, for example, well before the firstethnologists arrived, practically all the men hadalready adopted steel axeheads, whose use hadrapidly diffused inland from the coast (Godelier& Garanger 1973).

335The twentieth-century polished stone axeheads of New Guinea: why study them?


The observations that have been maderegarding the use of polished stone tools havethus been based on isolated cases, and veryoften result from the western observers havingrequested a demonstration. This has been thecase among the Una (Fig. 1), who have usedsteel tools since 1961, and among the Wano inWest Papua, who have had them for a similarlength of time. Since the first people to contactthese communities had other preoccupationsthan the making of scientific observations, therewas a delay of around 20 years before anyonerecorded the techniques of tree felling and themodalities of producing stone axeheads. Thisrecording began just as the savoir-faire and thetraditions were beginning to disappear (Sillitoe1988). The idea that, in New Guinea, therecould still exist isolated groups who had neverbeen aware of steel axeheads is a veritablemyth, promoted by the media.

Stone tools were, until recently, at the centreof the physical and technical reproduction ofsmall groups of farmers of the Highlands. Thesecultivators’ gardens of sweet potato, taro andbananas are regularly opened up in the primaryor secondary forest, then abandoned after twoor three years at most, allowing the forest toregenerate. In other words, the agriculturaleconomy in this area of rapid and universal for-

est regeneration would not be possible withoutthe use of axes and adzes. Despite the unques-tionable efficacy of these stone tools, as hasbeen proven though demonstrations of treefelling (Blackwood 1950; Godelier & Garanger1973; Koch 1984; Pétrequin & Pétrequin 1993).The recent arrival of steel tools – facilitating theopening up of ever larger garden plots – hasprovoked a veritable intensification of the kindsof social relationship that are based on eco-nomic competition (Salisbury 1962).

In these societies, in the midst of changecaused by the imposition of peace by the armyand by missionaries concerned with salvationof the individual soul, the production of stoneaxeheads did not cease straight away. This ispartly because this production involved large-scale operations to produce axeheads for long-distance distribution, and partly because – aswe shall see – axeheads had greater significancethan as simple tools for clearing the forest.Thus, between 1960 and 1990, over twentyexamples of stone exploitation for axeheadmanufacture were described, in each case con-nected with outcrops of hard, tough rocks,whose distribution is very uneven. In addition,various other types of exploitation were docu-mented: mining operations near Mount Hagen(Burton 1984), shafts and mines in the Cyclops

Fig. 1.

Felling of a tree 55 cm

in diameter, by four

men working in relay

over around 90 minutes.

Langda

(West Papua, Indonesia),

Una group, 1993.


Mountains near Jayapura, quarrying in theYeleme massif (Fig. 2), and selective collectionfrom screes and from river-torrent depositsimmediately below the primary sites in theHighlands of West Papua (Hampton 1999;Pétrequin & Pétrequin 1993; 2006). These var-ious exploitations fed into extensive axehead-exchange networks extending over hundredsof kilometres, and in some cases to the islandslying off the north coast of New Guinea.

As regards the technological aspects ofexploitation, the nature of the raw materialdetermines how it is extracted and worked upinto roughouts. The toughest rock types, suchas glaucophanites, need to be extracted by fire-setting, and shaped using hard hammers orwith the aid of an anvil. For fine-grained, non-laminar rocks, such as the andesites anddolerites of the Langda region (Figs. 3 and 4), acomplex process of flaking with a hammer isinvolved. In the case of laminar amphibolitesand green schists, exploited by the Dani people,the rocks have to be sawn. At Ormu Wari, withrocks of the serpentinite family, which arecoarse-grained, the technique used is pecking(Fig. 7). Finally, the brown and black schists atTagi (Fig. 5) and the foothills of the Asmat coun-try are worked by direct grinding and polishing(Pétrequin & Pétrequin 1993).

Behind these real technical factors that deter-mine how rock is extracted and worked, therelie variations that are subtle but of great inter-est. In particular, one could cite the sawing ofglaucophane rocks to create exceptionally largepolished stone blades, far larger than is strictlyneeded for the purpose of felling trees.Similarly, with the amphibolites and glauco-phanites of the Yeleme massif, one sees differentgroups of exploiters coming to the same quar-ries and using different techniques to createroughouts: people of the Wano linguistic groupuse the technique of hammer and anvil,whereas the Dubele of the Lowlands use peck-ing and grinding/polishing, and the Dani andMoni saw the rock. Therefore, the technicaldeterminism of the rock itself can be subvertedby historically and culturally different groups,all drawn to the sources by their obvious eco-nomic wealth, making them veritable ‘AxeMountains’. Technological know-how to workrock evidently plays a considerable role, but isnot governed by the desire to maximise pro-duction. While most men are, in theory, capableof manufacturing an axehead by sawing or byworking on an anvil, it is only those men whoare able to do this on a regular basis thatbecome effective axehead producers, utilisingcomplex flaking or hammering procedures


Fig. 2.

Exploitation by fire-setting

at a glaucophane quarry.

Yeleme, Wang-Kob-Me


Wano group, 1984.

Fig. 3.Roughing out of a basalt block using a hard hammer,

following extraction by thermal shock. Langda

(West Papua, Indonesia), Una group, 1982.


which involve an element of risk that is difficultto manage. In inexperienced hands, the use ofsuch techniques could easily lead to roughoutbreakage.

In virtually all the regions where stone hasbeen exploited, one finds evidence for the var-ious stages involved in the roughing-out of anaxehead. At the extraction areas, the evidenceis dominated by those stages that involve highrisk: fire-setting to extract blocks by thermalshock; initial roughing-out with a heavy ham-mer; heavy pecking. After this stage theroughed-out blocks are transported down tothe permanent settlements and villages, wherethe final and very time-consuming processesof final pecking, or sawing, take place. Needlessto say, there may be variations in this overallscheme: the Wano of Ye-Ineri, who are skilledat flaking stone and who live a day’s marchaway from the quarries, make their very longroughouts of amphibolite schist by the exclu-

sive use of hard-hammer flaking, doing all ofthis at the quarry. In contrast, the Dani of west-ern New Guinea, who live further from thesource – a four or five-day’s march – transportlarge slabs of rock from the source to their set-tlements, in order to saw them there with theminimum of risk.

One can thus identify regional variations inthe ways in which communities that live closeto sources of stone extract and work it: thereare differences from one quarry to another inthe level of skill shown, and this relates to thefact that some groups exploit the rock fre-quently, others less so. (It should be added thatnot every community that lives close to a rocksource will engage in axehead manufacture;and among the communities that do, not everyman will be involved.) As regards identifyingindvidual specialist master axehead makers,famous for their flaking skills, these are onlyseen among those who exploit tough, fine-


Fig. 4.

Final shaping of basalt

roughouts, by flaking

with a soft hammer.

Langda (West Papua,

Indonesia),

Una group, 1993.


grained non-laminar rocks, as at Langda, Selaand Suntamon. Here, the production of longadzeheads with D-shaped sections from large,irregularly shaped blocks requires a difficultapprenticeship, reserved for just a few men ineach village where such manufacture takesplace (Fig. 4). This kind of specialisation is nota full-time activity, however, since the bestadzehead makers of Langda also have to culti-vate their garden plots and participate in war-fare.

The raw material of polished stone axeheads: rituals and social controls

These purely technical aspects, which havebeen emphasised by ethnoarchaeologists fromthe beginning of their studies, must howeverbe relativised. When these enquirers posedquestions about the techniques and the spe-cialisations (in line with their primary scientificinterest), the axehead producers responded interms of magical practices, rituals and myths,

which formed the foundation of social existencein New Guinea. Thus, we should not imaginethat all that was involved in axehead productionwas men fire-setting, breaking up, flaking,pecking and polishing those simple, particularlyhard rocks that constituted the wealth of aregion. The raw material being worked was notsimply a block of stone. On the contrary: in therealm of social imagery, we are dealing withmaterial that is almost a living entity, relatingto the origin of the world, to Dream Time. Ineffect, the axe- and adzeheads already existedwithin the rock, because according to mythsthey are born from the bodies of the PrimordialBeings, who offered them, when they died, tothe men of knowledge (the manufacturers), byway of intermediaries, the Proprietors of theLand (the ritual specialists). Thus, in the Yelememassif, the use of thermal shock (Fig. 2) allowspeople to disengage the axehead roughoutswhich are fragments of the bones of the Giantwhich had once been killed, cut up and eatenby the Wano when he emerged from the caveof the origin of the world. According to thisconcept, it is the power of the ritual specialists


Fig. 5.

Polishing of roughouts

of black schist.

Tagi (West Papua,

Indonesia), Dani group

of North Baliem, 1987.


that makes the axeheads emerge from the sur-face of the quarry. If fire-setting does not workthe first time, one rubs the rock with pig fat asa way of invoking the Mother of Axes(Pétrequin & Pétrequin 1993; 2006; Pétrequinet al. 2000). Among the Una, several powerfulfemale spirits are similarly invoked so that theMountain releases its adzehead roughouts.Furthermore, throughout the entire procedureof manufacture, specialists chant and pray tothe female spirits so that the roughouts do notbreak with the blows from the hammer(Louwersee 1998; Pétrequin & Pétrequin 1993;Stuart 2002). The same kinds of rituals as usedin axehead production (Burton 1994) have alsofrequently been recorded as applying to theexploitation of salt (Pétrequin et al. 2000) andto sources of clay for making pottery (Pétrequin& Pétrequin 2006). In each case, the idea is thesame: people are exploiting a sacred raw mate-rial which comes from the body, the humoursor the blood of a Dream Time Being, in placesthat are sometimes secret and often barred tothe uninitiated. If an alien human group seeksto exploit these sacred sites, the raw materialwill dry up and these people will fall ill, becausethey have not been initiated into the specificrituals for that place.

Contrary to appearances, we are dealingwith powerful and effective taboos. At Ormu,on the northern coast of Papua, only the ondoafiof the Nari lineage – one of the two traditionalhereditary chiefs – can decide the time andplace of an expedition to extract rock for ma-king axeheads, after he has spent some timealone on the mountain. In the Yeleme massif,the groups of men who come on expeditionsto exploit the quarries call upon Wano specia-lists who live at the foot of the mountain. AtLangda, in common with others in the Una lin-guistic group, only certain clans have access tothe dolerite outcrops, because only they knowthe myths, the chants and the rituals; further-more, at Langda the skull of one of thesePrimordial Beings was kept in a sacred house,along with the hammerstones used to shaperoughouts. When one wanted to obtain a par-ticularly long flaked axehead, only a few menwould know that it is necessary first to hunt atree kangaroo and stretch out its intestine alongone’s left arm (Pétrequin & Pétrequin 1993).

Of course one could smile at these taboos,these myths and these rituals surrounding theproduction of stone blades. But they form anintegral part of a powerful imagery that isaccepted by all and that can be found, withminor variations and named differently fromone region to another, anchored in collective

practice. In the Sepik valley, it is a group ofsacred objects (long natural blades of ringingrock) that forms the basis of control overexploitation of the rock by a single lineage, atChambri. Elsewhere, it may be a large sacredhammerstone, polished through long use,which allows the opening of a quarry at Ormu.Yet further afield, the axeheads of the Time ofthe Ancestors were held to be living organismswhich fly during the night and which one canattract using pork fat (Pétrequin & Pétrequin1993). Raw material that is sacred in origin,foundation myths, and secret rites are forms ofinitiation (and of restrictions) relating to theproduction of stone blades for axes and adzes.These objects are never simple stone tools.

This is probably one of the reasons why theextraction sites are not visited by individuals ontheir own. The need for an axehead as a tool oran object for commercial exchange is not suffi-cient reason to visit the source areas. With therare exception of manufacture from cobblesselected from riverine deposits, the productionof a stone axehead is not a simple act by anindividual, to be repeated as the need arises atany time during the year. In contrast, access tothese sacred raw materials – which form thepower and the wealth of a particular commu-nity (in the case of regional specialist producers)– is limited, regulated, and only takes place atcertain times.

To gain access to the source areas – whichwe may think of in terms of extraction sites butwhich are held to be sacred sites – a group ofmen set out, accompanied or preceded by a ri-tual specialist (the Proprietor or Master of theLand, who is in fact the hereditary leader whocontrols the performance of rituals). Since thequarries are at high altitudes, these expeditionscan last several weeks, as in the Yeleme massifwhere extraction by fire-setting continues untilseveral hundred roughouts have been obtained– the maximum number that can be carriedback to the village by each man (sometimesaccompanied by his wife). The timing of theexpeditions is entirely regulated by socialdemands, that is to say the regularity of cere-monial exchanges between partner villages,undertaken to pay funerary compensation atthe end of a war (blood payments), for the re-establishment of peace, or for new marriagealliances. It was during these festive occasionsthat the new roughouts were given out in largenumbers, and travelled outwards in medium-distance exchanges – a centrifugal movement.Coming in the opposite, centripetal directiontowards the centres of production was wealthin the form of pigs or of marine shells and new



wives. These transactions reaffirmed the axe-head producers’ alliances and exchange part-nerships (Larson 1987; Pétrequin & Pétrequin1993; 2006).

Ritually-prescribed extraction and shaping,and large scale exchanges or gift-giving: theseare what seem to have been the social condi-tions lying behind the production of stone axe-and adzeheads in New Guinea. This process,from which women are excluded, was not gov-erned by everyday needs for stone blades, butby repeated, collective, long-distance socialacts. In these conditions where production wasrapid and of short duration, it is not hard to seehow the number of roughouts produced wasalways insufficient for the demand of the userswho live at several days’ march away from thesource areas, or of the other communities whospecialised in polishing blades. And this is theprobable reason why other rocks, with inferiormechanical properties, were also exploited (inparticular schists, chloritites and laminar ser-pentinites) throughout most of New Guinea,to compensate for the chronic deficit in largeand fine stone blades. This secondary produc-tion, of ‘ersatz’ axeheads, was mainly to makeheavy tools for splitting wood, or very smalladze blades, which rarely circulated furtherthan the distance covered in a two to threedays’ march. The fact that these brown andblack schists and relatively weak metamorphicrocks were taken from torrent beds, minimallyflaked and mainly shaped through grinding(Fig. 5) makes it easy for us to understand thatthey were accorded a low social value, and thatthey scarcely featured in collective ceremonialexchanges.

Here, then, rapidly sketched above, is theessence of the stone axehead in New Guinea:it is a tool for men’s use, indispensible to thephysical reproduction of agricultural commu-nities, but also much more than that: a piece ofsacred material, surrounded by myths, ritualsand stories that accompany it over long dis-tances in its various exchanges and transfers.

Direct access and specialisation

So far as the production of stone axeheads inNew Guinea is concerned, to attempt to ratio-nalise this phenomenon in terms of a sequenceof technical acts (i.e. by employing the conceptof a chaîne opératoire, as used by those who spe-cialise in prehistoric technology and whose per-spective excludes consideration of socialaspects) may be indispensible, and yet it isinsufficient. What is indispensible is the use of

the general concept of a ‘chaîne opératoire’ – asconceived by ethnologists who focus on tech-niques of manufacture and use (Lemonnier1970; Pétrequin & Monnier 1995) – examinedwithin the context of the social controls andprescriptions which necessarily accompany it.To answer the question ‘how does one producea polished stone axehead?’ it is necessary to askthe associated question: ‘who does what, how,when and why?’ In effect, the most elementarytechnical acts form part of the functioning ofsociety and risk becoming incomprehensible ifthey are divorced from their context. This is whywestern, ‘common sense’ approaches that seekto apply the law of least effort and the law ofmaximum return to the understanding of stoneaxehead production in New Guinea, or indeedin prehistory, cannot constitute valid scientificexplanations.

To begin our more detailed investigation intothe circulation of stone blades in New Guinea,we need to remember how, and at whatrhythm, the exchange networks are suppliedfrom the source areas, from the extraction expe-ditions. Two contrasting case studies suggestthemselves – leaving aside (as being of negli-gible significance) those acts of episodic, indi-vidual production of axeheads of mediocremechanical quality, using cobbles gatheredfrom torrent beds. The question of the level oftechnological know-how (and its consequence,the question of whether production is done bythe many or by the few) is essential in distin-guishing between the two case studies.

In the first example, illustrated by the extrac-tion of stone in the Yeleme massif, the level ofsavoir-faire is rather low and all men can acquireit, because the apprenticeship period is short.As a result, the commonest mode of exploita-tion is by expeditions of men from virtually allthe communities lying within a three- to five-day journey from the massif. How these expe-ditions are carried out is regulated by variousrituals at the quarries – as mentioned above –but above all, by the relationships that havebeen established around the quarries betweenthe communities who speak Wano, Moni andDani. Without these relationships (which areessentially achieved through marriage, andestablished by the Proprietors of the Land),these direct-access expeditions would be dan-gerous or impossible. Despite this, the desire tobrave the political and ritual interdictions andto go to the Yeleme quarries (or, elsewhere, tothe salt sources in Moni country, another sourceof wealth) has been demonstrated by the Daniof North Baliem who, throughout the twentiethcentury, preferentially exploited the best



sources of axehead rock and the richest brinesprings (Larson 1987; Pétrequin et al. 2000). Ineach valley, the cycle of wars, occurring everysix to nine years, is another powerful factor reg-ulating direct-access expeditions: any suchexpedition can only take place during periodswhen peace has been re-established and funer-ary compensation has been paid with pigs, axe-heads and salt (Larson 1987). Under thesesocial conditions and at the scale of theexploited area in the massif, production fromthe quarries has ended up being massive, withcommunities over a large area enjoying directaccess, even if the individual expeditions areepisodic and take place at irregular intervals.

We must however remember that not everyman in the region in question participates insuch expeditions, which are undertaken in amountainous area that can be difficult andsometimes dangerous to traverse. Exploitingthe Yeleme rock is a task for warriors who ra-pidly accumulate temporary wealth and acquirean incontestable social aura; other men preferthe simpler life of staying in the village and con-centrating on cultivating their garden plots andraising pigs, to produce resources that, like axe-heads, can be used in compensatory payments.The most recent exploitation of the Yelemequarries has been undertaken by a particularkind of warrior, the ‘entrepreneur’ (Pospisil1963), who seeks to make a rapid material andsocial profit and is willing to take risks toachieve this.

The second case study concerns thoseexploitations which require a high level of tech-nical skill (duly regulated by ritual, of course).These are undertaken by part-time specialists,who are the only people capable of producingtop quality stone blades; their technical know-ledge is complex and is shared only among cer-tain lineages. The exploitations at Langda, Selaand Suntamon offer good examples of thissophisticated process of flaking; similarly, thoseat Ormu and various villages around theCyclops Mountains exemplify excellence in thecreation of long axeheads formed entirely bypecking (Wichmann 1917; Wirz 1928). In the-ory, direct access to the stone sources would bepossible for other groups (on condition of theirmaintaining alliance relations with theProprietors of the Land), but these strangerswould only be permitted to take away rough,unshaped blocks of low value and they wouldnot have the appropriate savoir-faire to createhigh-quality axeheads. Thus, production of thelatter rests entirely in the hands of the techni-cians (and the ritual specialists) who live at leastone day’s march away from the outcrops.

Production, always on a large scale, is governedby the rhythm of ritual exchanges between vil-lages: on the one side of these exchanges arethe specialist axehead producers, and on theother are communities that exploit differentecological niches, either at higher altitude(whose exchange goods are birds of paradise,decorated woven bags, pigs, tobacco and gar-den produce) or in the Lowlands (who offerbows made from laurel wood, marine shells,sago palm flour, pottery and dogs’ teeth). Allthese products regularly change hands duringfestivals linking partner villages (festivals whichare called mote in the Eastern Highlands).

In actual fact, a prehistorian would have dif-ficulty in distinguishing between these twomodes of production unless s/he was able toevaluate the levels of expertise and technicalspecialisation involved on the basis of theworking debris left at the quarries and in thevillages. As regards the geographical distribu-tion of axe- and adzeheads from the sourceareas, in spite of the fundamental differencesin the social contexts of production betweenthe system of expeditions run by ‘entrepre-neurs’ and that which operates on the principleof ritualised exchanges between partner vil-lages, the end result is the same: large numbersof roughouts move outwards according to acyclical rhythm. The distribution patterns relat-ing to each of these cyclical episodes of produc-tion rapidly blur into each other within theoverall context of the mountainous massifswhere exploitation takes place, because of thesheer number of different exploitations carriedout by different communities, each one regu-lated by specific social rhythms. The discoveryof unpolished roughouts far away from thequarries could be a good indicator that suchlarge scale episodes of production have takenplace.

In each of the two case studies discussedabove, the process of large-scale production –whether it be undertaken by non-specialist‘entrepreneurs’ or by specialist ‘traditional part-ners’ – produces masses of roughouts and ofblades ground or polished to varying degrees,which enter in large numbers into the inter-community or inter-individual transfers. Thiscentrifugal movement does not seem to dimin-ish in its force the further that the productstravel away from the quarry: this runs contraryto the classic model of ‘down the line’ exchange(Hodder 1976; Renfrew 1975, 1977). The reasonfor this is that the principle underlying theexchanges is to have an ever-replenished sup-ply of items to give to one’s partners.

Naturally, the notion of making a profit –



attaining material wealth, winning social pres-tige – is far from absent in these transfers ofaxeheads, pigs, marine shells, salt and productsof the forest and of the garden. However, glob-ally, every man can procure his own axeheads,feathers, shells and bows which are necessaryto the signalling of his social status and culturalidentity. The idea of solely making a materialprofit – that is, hoarding material for one’s ownbenefit, keeping it in a treasure store and pass-ing it on to one’s descendants – is not absent,but usually it is secondary to the concept ofsocial and political profit (in the form of parad-ing this wealth in public, making a reputation,establishing a clientele and a network of part-ners and allies, and momentarily achieving aposition of dominance). The same is true ofthose villages on the coast or the islands whichspecialise in ceramic production (Irwin 1984).In spite of the famous counter-examples amongthe Big Men in central Papua New Guinea(Burton 1987) or on the north coast of WestPapua, this system in which wealth is in con-stant circulation conforms well with the imageof relatively egalitarian societies, in whichhereditary transmission of social status occursonly exceptionally (Lemonnier 1986). We shallreturn later to the exceptions in question.

Finally, the limits of these long-distanceexchange systems cannot simply be thought ofin terms of kilometres’ distance as the crowflies, or of days of marching, especially since thediffusion of axeheads, of salt, of shells and offeathers is not identical in each direction ema-nating from the centres of production. Instead,we have to learn to conceptualise in terms ofthe social distance between the different com-munities involved in the transactions(Pétrequin & Pétrequin 1993). In fact, anexchange system can ‘run out of steam’ orbecome interrupted if the right social condi-tions for the circulation of polished stone bladesare not in place. These limits often coincide withthe temporary fronts created by wars; by contactwith traditional enemies; by the passage ofother linguistic groups through the area, withwhom contact has not yet been made. In con-trast, what helps to make a system runsmoothly is relative sedentism and intermar-riage, long-held contacts, acculturation, tradi-tional partnerships, colonising movements andthe competition between men that is offeredby feasts and by masses of socially-valorisedobjects. These provide an effective medium bywhich a man can gain renown and, sometimes,power.

Tools whose use is socially prescribed

So, here we have men who are equipped withan adze or an axe, slung over their shoulder,which they want to polish and re-use for a longtime. But these tools of forest clearing, some-times used as weapons in combat, are not sim-ply technical tools, as Axel Steensberg hadthought (1980). Rather, they are already socialsigns which – just like bows and arrows – signalthat their owners have gained membership toadult male society. Moreover, the ways of haft-ing the stone blades and of lashing them to thehaft vary from one region to another (Sillitoe1988), thereby enabling the viewer to assess thecultural proximity of different groups just bylooking at an axe or adze. From these differentways of hafting one can also trace the long his-tory of innovations which had arrived in NewGuinea on the north coast and which were pro-gressively transmitted inland towards the inte-rior (Pétrequin & Pétrequin 2006). Thus, incommon with other tools, axes and adzeswould appear to be socially prescribed artefacts(Lemonnier 1986).

In some cases, the extent and intensity ofsurface polish on stone axeheads tends toincrease with increasing distance from the par-ent quarry. This relates to the desire to show offwith a particularly fine-looking social symbol,and it involves a considerable investment oftime over and above that spent by the originalmakers. These axeheads demand an even moresophisticated social interpretation (Højlund1981). Among the Wano and Dani, young war-riors, at the age when they are competing toaffirm their authority in society, tend to carryaround in public axes with long, heavy blades,hafted in a single-piece haft. They try to felltrees using these very heavy tools, despite thefact that older men work quickly using axe-heads that scarcely exceed one to two kilogramsand which permit them to fell trees collectively,in a group effort to open new garden areas inthe forest.

This process of social differentiation is evenmore obvious on the northern coast of WestPapua, in the Sentani culture around theCyclops Mountains. During public ceremonies,certain hereditary chiefs (the ondoafi) of domi-nant lineages, who are considered to be directdescendants of the Proprietors of the Land, useaxes with blades of rare rocks, which are veryregular in shape and have been polished for along time by rubbing against the leaves of theNibong palm (Figs. 6 and 7); sometimes the axe-heads are also enveloped in latex, to make them



shine ‘like water’, as they say (Pétrequin &Pétrequin 1993; 2006). These axeheads withtheir mirror-like polish, presented in the hand,unhafted, are symbols of social status andpower. They are carefully curated, kept withinorganic cases and rarely touched with fingers,so as not to dull their brilliance. As for ordinarymen, who belong to lineages deemed to havearrived recently in the region, not one of theseis allowed access to these axeheads that aretreasured by the elite. These axeheads areextraordinary in their raw material, the qualityof their finish, and also in their history, theirbiography. It can also be the case that small butvery ancient axeheads are also prized morehighly than the longest examples, by reason oftheir biography: owners can cite from memorya long litany of the successive previous owners.By virtue of his power, an ondoafi can thus accu-mulate a score or so of very highly polished axe-heads which he has acquired throughinheritance or by receiving marriage compen-sation payments, or blood money (Fig. 8). Insome cases, such axeheads may be acquiredthrough hostilities. However, in general, manyof these special axeheads are destined to begiven away in public ceremonies to establishexchange partnerships, to re-establish peace,or to seal exceptional marriage alliances withother elite families.

Sometimes a set of axeheads may not be theproperty of a high-ranking individual, butrather of a dominant lineage. In these cases theaxeheads reside in the sacred house in the vil-lage, a large polygonal structure as seen in theHumboldt Bay area, close to the city now calledJayapura (Galis 1955). Such axeheads were con-sidered as sacred objects, given by a PrimordialCreature; they were inalienable, and enabled alineage to substantiate its claims over land andover people (Godelier 1996; Pétrequin &Pétrequin 2006).

The concept of such sacred objects is foundthroughout the Sentani culture, where in addi-tion to axeheads the category encompassesglass beads, believed to have been gatheredfrom beneath the Bead Tree in the Land of theSko people, and glass bangles which, as every-one knows, are the vertebrae of the GreatPython. These sacred objects are given to apartner in exchange for other socially-prizedobjects, or are given in payment for a seriousloss. The value of each axehead, bead and ban-gle (Fig. 9) is discussed on a case by case basisand according to its colour, its transparency, itslustre and according to the respective socialstanding of the donor and the recipient. Thepractice of giving axeheads as funerary com-

pensation or marriage payment would seem tosuggest that these ancient ‘tools’ in fact repre-sent the equivalence of human lives, as is thecase with pigs in the Highlands (Lemonnier1990) and with pearl rings, loaves of salt,imported fabrics and Chinese porcelain in thenorth-west of West Papua and the islands inthe Bay of Cenderawasih (Pétrequin &Pétrequin 2006).

The same phenomenon is known among thepeople of the Dani linguistic group, in theHighlands of West Papua. Here, the social inter-pretation of stone axeheads in terms of theirequivalence with human lives is even moreobviously expressed. In these communitieswhere the population is very dense, peoplehoard, exchange, give and receive ye-yao (Fig.10). A ye-yao is a long blade in greenschist oramphibolitic schist, from the secret quarries atAwigobi, in the heart of the aforementionedYeleme massif (Pétrequin & Pétrequin 1993;2006). Awigobi signifies the ‘River of the Night’,the flow of water along which the ancestorsproceed at night with their torches, in theirsearch for these long schist plaques that emit aluminous greenish glow in the dark. In otherregions, such as southern Baliem Valley, it is saidthat these long slabs had been the splinters ofYeli, the Sacred Tree dating from the beginning


Fig. 6.

Polishing to a high

sheen of a long axehead

by rubbing against

a bed of leaves of the

Nibong-palm, very rich

in phytoliths.

Ormu Wari


Ormu group, 1984.


of the world (Zöllner 1988). In reality, the stoneat Awigobi was worked by fire-setting, flakingwith a hammer and then longitudinal sawing.This process produced not only the mosthighly-prized objects (the ye-yao), but alsoknives for peeling taro tubers, and adzeheads,much used by the Moni and the N’duga. Thus,one part of the production at Awigobi had beenselected and diverted from its primary technicalfunction (i.e. the manufacture of axeheads andadzeheads). These ye-yao, after being sawn andcarefully polished, were dressed in a miniatureskirt and in pendants made from the fur of thetree kangaroo (Fig. 10), in order to transformthem into women of stone. Here, therefore, weare dealing with veritable anthropomorphicrepresentations, of symbols equivalent tohuman lives, known and accepted by all assuch. Among the Dani, the ye-yao (orexchange-axeheads) were given as marriagepayments, as funerary compensation and forthe payment of blood money (O’Brien 1969).Thousands of these axeheads circulated around

Fig. 7.

Presentation of a long

serpentinite axehead

by one of the two

traditional chiefs of

the village of Ormu.

Ormu Wari


Ormu group, 1984.

Fig. 8.

Axeheads and roughouts

belonging to one of the

two traditional chiefs

of the village of Ormu.


Ormu group, 1984.


the Dani of West Papua and in the Baliem Valley,never to be seen publicly except during pay-ment rituals.

Among the long axeheads, of varying length– the largest one that we have observed being90 cm long – certain examples had an alto-gether different value. Lacking clothing, butsmeared with pig fat over a long period, the ye-pibit were sacred objects kept exclusively inmens’ houses among the Dani and in sacredhouses among the Yali. They were priceless totheir owner or to a lineage: these were sacreditems that were kept secret, because they heldwithin them the power of a Great Warrior whohad been killed in combat, or had been the giftof a powerful Spirit. The ye-pibit only excep-tionally saw the light of day, after a pig hadbeen killed in order to nourish the axehead(thereby renewing the coating of pig fat), on theoccasion of a ritual of collective healing, for amagic ceremony to ensure the fertility of thegardens, or to celebrate victory in combat.Others were never seen in public, because inthem resided the power of a lineage or the saltcontent of a well-known brine spring. Hereonce more we find the idea of sacred objects,which are living pieces of the Primordial Beings:this is what accords them their value as itemsto be given or exchanged (Godelier 1996;Pétrequin & Pétrequin 2006).

We should therefore not be surprised toobserve that in New Guinea and its neighbour-ing islands, certain axeheads are still presentedin public, even though workaday stone axe-heads had long ago been replaced by theircounterparts in steel. The example of theTrobriand Islands cited by Bronisław Mali-nowski (1935) describes a garden magic ritualwhere a colossal axe, with a polished stone axe-head from the distant island of Woodlark, wascarried with great ceremony around the gar-dens to restore their fertility. One could alsomention the highly polished axehead thatfound its way from the north coast of NewGuinea, to the treasury of the Sultanate ofTidore in the North Moluccas, around 1500kilometres as the crow flies to the west. Thisaxehead from the Cyclops Mountains takes itsplace there among objects of gold and silver(Pétrequin & Pétrequin 2006).

Conclusion

All these examples are far from being excep-tional (Weiner 1992). One finds similar phe-nomena in Polynesia and in New Guinea,where a nephrite axehead was considered to be

so valuable that a war could break out over itsappropriation (Best 1912). These recent ethno-graphic situations give us a very good idea ofthe continuum of social interpretations whichcan make a stone tool, extracted from the livingrock that belongs to the Dream Time, into asacred object – a gift from the PrimordialBeings. What we see, then, in these stone sym-bols that form the basis of exchanges and gifts,circulating over long distances and beingmanipulated by men for their profit, is theinvestment into them of an ideal value that isaccepted by everybody, since it arises from pro-found religious convictions.

These ethnographic examples, featuringcontemporary New Guinea societies that areonly weakly stratified, have taken us a long wayfrom Neolithic Europe, but have guided usalong paths that are much more complicatedthan a simple binary opposition between‘workaday’ tools and ‘prestige items’, to use thewell-worn phrases. Further examples couldeasily be found in less egalitarian societies,where power rests with divine rulers. For exam-ple, in Mesoamerica, Guatemalan jade objectswere reserved for use by the elite and by thegods: these were funerary masks, beads and


Fig. 9.

Serpentinite axeheads

polished to a high sheen,

and rings and beads of

coloured glass, from the

treasury of one of the two

traditional chiefs of Abar.

Abar (West Papua,

Indonesia), central

Sentani group, 2008.


pendants, and also consecrated polished axe-heads, bearing engraved inscriptions andanthropomorphic representations. Finally, onecould consider the character ‘yü’ which signifiesjade in China: at the bottom and at the top aretwo horizontal lines, representing the Earth andthe Sky/Heaven, and linking them is a verticalline that signifies communication between thetwo worlds. This communication is undertakenby the Emperor himself, the divine ruler (rep-resented as a short horizontal line midwaybetween Heaven and Earth), by means of a pol-ished axehead of jade (shown as a little obliquestroke beside the Emperor’s short line). It isclear that what this character signifies is themediatory power of the Emperor and of thejade axehead, in a society where absolute powerwas also founded on religious beliefs.

At different scales, one can see that it is thesame basic idea that is being expressed in theseethnographic and historical instances: the axe-head, having become a sacred object, partici-pates (along with other symbols such as thering, the cross, et cetera) in communicationbetween the different worlds and in religiouspower. Perhaps, then, in this we may havefound various new keys with which to approachthe functions of polished stone axeheads inNeolithic Europe. We need to take into account,of course, the contexts in which the axeheadshave been discovered: this aspect is essential to

our understanding, and yet is all too oftenignored by specialist studies, which focus asthey do on petrography, on technology or ontypology. At stake is a truly complex situation.In order to address this, we need not onlymeticulous analysis, carried out according tothe criteria of hard science, but we also have toapply, in an integrated manner, the entiremethodological armoury of archaeology, of his-tory and of ethnology. We now need to startafresh with the archaeological material, to cre-ate theoretical reconstructions of the past whichincorporate religious and ritual dimensions, andto construct narratives of Neolithic societiesthat are a lot more complex than those thathave been, and are currently, offered by the var-ious partners in archaeological research.


Fig. 10.

Exchange axehead of

amphibolite schist,

dressed in a married

woman’s skirt and

adorned with fur

pendants.

Pyramid (West Papua,

Indonesia), Dani group

of North Baliem, 1984.


AcknowledgementsAlison Sheridan is thanked for undertaking thedifficult translation of this complex text. The work was carried out as part of a project, ‘JADE: Socialinequalities in Neolithic Europe – the circulation of large axeheads of Alpine jades’, funded as a‘Programme Blanc’ by the Agence Nationale de laRecherche and administered through the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de l’Environnement,University of Besançon (2007–2009).

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