found in flint hatchets ascribed by Professor Flinders Petrie[1] to the twelfth dynasty. What may be a stone hatchet mounted occurs in a painting at Medum.[2]
Another Australian method of mounting implies the possession of some resinous material susceptible of being softened by heat, and again becoming hard and tough when cold. This mode is exhibited in Fig. 106, which represents a rude instrument from Western Australia, now in my collection, engraved in the Archæologia.[3] It is hammer-like at one end, axe-like at the other, and is formed of either one or two roughly chipped pieces of basalt-like stone entirely unground, and secured in a mass of resinous
Fig. 106.—Hatchet—Western Australia.
gum, in which the handle is inserted. In most implements of this kind there appear to be two separate stones used to form the double blade, and these are sometimes of different kinds of rock. It would seem that the shaft, either cleft or uncleft, passed between them, and that the stones, when bound with string to hold them in their places, were further secured with a mass of the gum of the Xanthorrhæa or grass-tree.[4]
Such a method of hafting cannot, I think, have been in general use in this country, for want of the necessary cementing material, though, from discoveries made in Scandinavia, it would appear that a resinous pitch was in common use for fixing bronze implements to their handles; so that the practice may also have applied to those of stone. In the Swiss Lake-dwellings, bitumen was used as a cement for attaching stone to wood. In the case of the axes of the Indians on the River Napo,[5] Ecuador, the binding of
- ↑ "Kahun," pl. xvi. "Illahun," pl. vii.
- ↑ "Medum" (1892), Frontisp. 14, p. 31.
- ↑ Vol. xxxiv. p. 172. See also Wood, "Nat. Hist. of Man," vol. ii. p. 32.
- ↑ Bonwick's "Daily Life of the Tasmanians," p. 44; Trans. Ethnol. Soc., N. S., vol. iii. p. 267. Several specimens are figured in Ratzel, "Völkerk," vol. ii. p. 46
- ↑ See Arch. per l'Anth. e la Etn., vol. xxv., 1895, p. 283.
