I have been living in Possum Valley since 1976, and it is beginning to seem like a long time even to me. but a couple of days ago I was reminded it is but a heartbeat in the great scheme of things when I found a stone axe on the track just 5 m from the porch of Maple Cottage.
Fits nicely in the hand
It attracted my attention because I am familiar with the bed rock here as being wall to wall rhyolite. Nor was it the light coloured rocks of the road gravel. As soon as I picked it up though it was caked in dirt, I could see it was an aboriginal stone axe. I have found many in my travels around Australia, including two manufacturing sites where there were dozens in various stages of preparation, presumably discarded for some revealed flaw rather than taken to completion. One was in the Northern Territory in an opening into a lava tunnel I think, where the roof had collapsed. The other manufacturing site was in western Queensland about halfway between Mt Isa and the Gulf. I was doing mineral exploration work near an ancient fault line and rocks from the other side of the fault turned up in large numbers on and in uniform sizes, on our side with completely different sedimentary geology. I was rock sampling an area of about 1.5kms by 2.5kms using a grid surveyed (by us) with pegs every 50m. The required sampling technique was to go in a circle 5m around the peg, and every 2 paces chip a rock with a geopick (hammer with spike), and bag the chip. Except these stray rocks could not be chipped. No matter how long and hard I flogged and flailed at these dense green rocks, they could not be chipped. The geologist told me to leave them, which was just as well as I couldn’t break them, because they were not part of the local geology and had been carried there by human agency. They were green tinged ‘Eastern Creek Volcanics’, much prised axe heads and traded all over Australia because they are virtually indestructible, as I found the hard way. Considering the numbers of ECV floaters I found, it must have been a considerable industry lasting millenniums.
nice even angle on the ground edge
On my page ‘History’, I have detailed digging spuds in the Evelyn district and turning up large numbers of axe heads. My share I long ago donated to Ravenshoe Visitor Centre. I think I will keep this one found in Possum Valley. There is no way of dating stone axes except if they are found in soil strata which is undisturbed and can be dated by some marker such as volcanic ash or carbon inclusions. So the one I found could be 1000 or 40,000 years old. It may have been accidentally dropped or deliberately discarded because of the chip in the cutting edge. All the axes I have come across in Australia have been ground to an edge rather than ‘napped’ or flaked as is common elsewhere. Some of the local axes had a groove on one side parallel to the cutting edge and were obviously designed to be hafted. This one does not and was designed to be a hand axe.
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