I’ve been reading a lot about the Stone Age lately, and everyone always refers to the various stone tools common to various cultures. Arrowheads, knife blades, and scrapers fro removing meat/tanning hides seem obvious enough in function, as do hammers and axes.
But what about stone adzes?
Now, I’ve used modern metal adzes. I’ve hollowed out a wooden chair seat with a gutter adz, and I’ve seen folks dress square timbers with a regular adz. But what the heck where our Stone Age forefathers doing with them adzes? I’ve even seen them referred to as being the only large tools some people (i.e., certain polynesians) had, and their use to clear land for farming.
I am not sure that primitive stone tools and clear area farming are a reasonable pair of skills to link to one culture.
That point aside, your primitive ancestors were probably doing much the same thing with their adzes that you do. Hollowing out a wooden basin, shaping bone implements, and other simple tasks requiring a hard sharp edge, and a heavy bodied blade. Hand held adzes might not be much of a carvers implement, but when compared to fingernails, they probably seem great.
Have you seen the woodcraft on NZ Moari tribla lodges ?
Much of it is done using the adze which just goes to show that the preconceptions of the adze being a somewhat unsubtle and finesse free tool are mistaken.
The work in some of these lodges is awesome, the skill of the crftsmen is remarkable.
Adzes are wonderful tools. Think of all the things you can do with an axe. Well, an adze is really just an axe with the blade turned 90°. Now think of all the things an axe is oriented the wrong way for. That’s when you’d want your adze.
Most obviously, our Stone Age grandcestors used adzes to hollow out tree trunks for their dugout canoes.
Columbus reported adzes used by the Caribs on Cuba on his fourth voyage. They used them to hollow palm tree trunks for sea-worthy canoes that took him to Puerto Rico.
Let two clarifications be made here:[list=1][li]We’re talking primitive stone tools, not extremely primitive stone tools. A chipped (“Paleolithic”) core is pretty useless against a tree…or a shrub, for that matter. A ground (“Neolithic”) stone adze blade, however, can be quite effective, if you don’t mind woring to exhaustion.[/li][li]As anyone who’s ever done landscaping will know, after the tree is cut down, the stump remains in the ground. What then? Well, we have more powerful engines then our early ancestors did (theirs were called “oxen”), and nifty new biologicals to turn it into compost quickly. Otherwise, however, the choices for dealing with a tree stump 4000 years BP were remarkably similar to what they are now: burn it, yank it out, or go around it until it rots enough that a plow can get through the roots. The Greek countryside attests to the effectiveness of these methods when diligently applied over generations.[/li][/list=1]