Chert Tools

This website contains supplementary material relating to a collection of chert tools made in the Was valley of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, which have featured in a series of publications (Sillitoe 1988, 2004, Sillitoe and Hardy 2003a, Hardy and Sillitoe 2003b, and Shott and Sillitoe 2005).

The central mountains of New Guinea were the last region on earth where substantial populations depended on stone tools, some people using them until relatively recently. They are heirs to a sophisticated farming tradition that archaeological excavations (in the Mount Hagen region) show dates back to some 9,000 years BP, putting these people (together with those of Mesopotamia and Meso-America) among the first humans to practice farming, but they continued using stone tools until modern times.

The stone tools used by New Guinea Highlanders are of two principal kinds. The most eye-catching is a beautiful polished stone axe mounted on a wooden haft, which in some places people continued to use until the mid-twentieth century. The other comprises roughly knapped chert flakes that have attracted considerably less interest, and which some individuals may still use occasionally for some tasks. While not as glamorous as the stone axe, the chert flake has a wide range of uses, including shaping, scraping, paring, shaving, smoothing and boring a range of materials such as wood, bark, bamboo, cane, bone, tusk and seashell.

The supplementary material is as follows:

Introduction to tools and catalogue

Gallery of chert tool collection (images digitized by Chris Bond and John Davies) Catalogue of chert tool collection