Busacca Gallery

A very fine stone axe that has good age, it is large and Historical. Mt Hagen ceremonial stone axe, Papua New Guinea, this is a tribal artifact with curved gray stone. This stone ax is a cultural treasure, Mount Hagen (Papua New Guinea) ceremonial axe: Found in the New Guinea forest in 1977. The axe consist of a large gray stone. Nice old patina, the blade is in good condition. This is a great looking axe head, chisel tool, neolithic stone implement. These kinds of weapons have been used for defense, survival, and ceremony. People in New Guinea made their axes and adzes from quarried rock that was reduced to manageable size with large hammerstones. They were then percussion flaked into shape with smaller hammerstones then ground smooth by hand.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tools

A stone tool is, in the most general sense, any tool made either partially or entirely out of stone. Although stone tool-dependent societies and cultures still exist today, most stone tools are associated with prehistoric, particularly Stone Age cultures that have become extinct. Archaeologists often study such prehistoric societies, and refer to the study of stone tools as lithic analysis. Stone has been used to make a wide variety of different tools throughout history, including arrow heads, spearpoints and querns. Stone tools may be made of either ground stone or chipped stone, and a person who creates tools out of the latter is known as a flintknapper.



Chipped stone tools are made from cryptocrystalline materials such as chert or flint, radiolarite, chalcedony, basalt, quartzite and obsidian via a process known as lithic reduction. One simple form of reduction is to strike stone flakes from a nucleus (core) of material using a hammerstone or similar hard hammer fabricator. If the goal of the reduction strategy is to produce flakes, the remnant lithic core may be discarded once it has become too small to use. In some strategies, however, a flintknapper reduces the core to a rough unifacial or bifacial preform, which is further reduced using soft hammer flaking techniques or by pressure flaking the edges. More complex forms of reduction include the production of highly standardized blades, which can then be fashioned into a variety of tools such as scrapers, knives, sickles and microliths. In general terms, chipped stone tools are nearly ubiquitous in all pre-metal-using societies because they are easily manufactured, the tool stone is usually plentiful, and they are easy to transport and sharpen.