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1923.76.5

Adze of ground dark basalt, rectangular in section with slightly curved cutting edge, tapered along its length. [SM 10/10/2008]

1923.76.5

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Collection type
Object
Description
Adze of ground dark basalt, rectangular in section with slightly curved cutting edge, tapered along its length. [SM 10/10/2008]
Geographical reference
New Zealand
Oceania > Australia and New Zealand > New Zealand
North Island Waikato District near Hamilton
Cultural groups
Māori
Date / Period
Date made: Before 1908
Date collected
1908
Acquisition information
Purchased: 06/1923
Materials and processes
Material Basalt Stone, Process Ground
Dimensions
Width: max 55 mm, Length: max 99 mm
Object numbers
Accession number: 1923.76.5
Research and responses

For general information, see The Old-Time Maori (by Makereti sometime Chieftainess of the Arawa Tribe, known in New Zealand as Maggie Papakura; collected and edited with a biography by T. K. Penniman), London: Victor Gollancz, 1938. [JC 14 5 1996]

See also ‘Makereti’, by Hélène La Rue, in Collectors: Collecting for the Pitt Rivers Museum, ed. Alison Petch (Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, no date [1996]), pp. 31-35. [JC 11 6 1997]

These adzes were examined by Dr Yvonne Marshall, University of Southampton, as part of the Fell funded project Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections. She advised that all these adzes are exceptional and of early ‘archaic’ forms which went out of production before the first pa, or fortified villages, were built. Moreover they could only have come from burials. [AS 07/07/2010]

Associated publications
Illustrated in colour as Figure 28.1 on page 557 of 'New Zealand', by Yvonne Marshall, in World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: A Characterization, edited by Dan Hicks and Alice Stevenson (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013), pp. 554-563. Caption (same page): 'Figure 28.1 Eight stone adzes donated by Mrs Staples-Brown (Makereti), said to have been 'dug up on D. MacFarlane's sheep-run near Hamilton, New Zealand' (PRM Accession Numbers 1923.76.1-8).'. [MJD 04/07/2014] For a discussion of the circumstances in which some of the objects that once belonged to Makereti were acquired by the Museum, see ‘Makereti and the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1921–1930, and Beyond’, by Ngahuia te Awekotuku and Jeremy Coote, in Pacific Presences 2: Oceanic Art and European Museums (Pacific Presences series, 4b), edited by Lucie Carreau, Alison Clark, Alana Jelinek, Erna Lilje, and Nicholas Thomas (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2018), pp. 277–95, 460–63. This object is referred to on page 281: 'In June 1923, when her [Makereti's] marriage to Staples-Browne was coming to an end and she may have needed funds, she sold some objects to the museum for £5. This collection comprised eight prehistoric stone tools that had been dug up in 1908 near Hamilton in the Waikato region (1923.76.1-.8), along with two stone pounders - a patu muka for pounding harakeke (flax) and a paoi for tenderizing fern-root (1923.76.9-.10).' (Printout of article in RDF: Biographies: Makereti.) [JC 4 1 2019]

Search terms: Tool, Adze

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