Axe makers of the Wahgi: pre-colonial industrialists of the Papua New Guinea highlands

Abstract

Before the first Australian patrol to Mt Hagen in 1933, Stone axes were in daily use in the Papua New Guinea highlands and were widely traded, often in the context of ceremonial exchange. Many occurrences of hard rocks suitable for axe making were exploited, but only at a few centres was the manufacture of axes carried out on a large scale. In recent times, a group of axe factories located in the Wahgi and Jimi Valleys accounted for the bulk of production. In this thesis I look at how the communities of axe makers organised quarrying expeditions, how they extracted the stone and made it into axes, and at the kinds of economic relations which existed between themselves and their neighbours. I focus on the Tuman quarries, In the central Wahgi Valley, Western Highlands Province, and the organisation of Tuman society with special reference to quarrying and axe making. I introduce the quarries of the Jimi Valley, also in Western Highlands Province, and the Dom language area, in Simbu Province, for comparative purposes. I also report on the use of geochemical methods and visual inspection to identify axes in ethnographic and archaeological collections from the highlands. My findings are twofold. Firstly, that the type of production at each quarry was shaped by the balance of three factors: the geological disposition and mechanical properties of the axe stone, the ideology of the axe makers, and the ceremonial competitiveness of the economy in which they exchanged the axes. I argue that the scarcity or abundance of rocks suitable for quarrying was less important than the ability of a given community to respond to socioeconomic forces, develop an effective system of quarrying and sustain production at a high level. The second finding is that axe stone from the modern quarries can be identified in rockshe]ters in levels dated to 2500-1500 years before the present. Bearing in mind the close relationships that I describe between social organisation, the wealth economy and quarrying methods, I conclude that this is one of the markers of the emergence in the highlands of a society of essentially modern aspect.