Apart from differences in size and cross-section, Linton realized the great importance of the presence or absence of the tang 3 in adzes, also the extent to which grinding was carried out. In his study of Marquesan adzes in 1923, Linton (4) made great advances in typology. Although devoting a chapter to detailed description of adzes in the light of his terminology, Best failed to classify them explicitly into types. ![]() Nowhere else perhaps was there such a unique opportunity of tracing out in terms of adze forms the migration and relationships of the scattered Polynesians.īest first devised an acceptable terminology which has remained the basis of all systems since. Nowhere else in the world did stone tools exhibit such distinctive form and unusual variation in type. Such pioneer students as Brigham (2) in the Hawaiian, and Best (3) in the Maori field soon realized the need for a standard terminology, and - 287 also a typology which would obviate the cumbersome practice of describing adzes as of Hawaiian or Tahitian or New Zealand type. The preceding attempt to compare and describe adze-types in general descriptive terms suggests the obvious need for a standard typology and terminology 2 in describing Maori (and Polynesian) adzes. The assertion is made also with one major reservation, namely that the people who made the adzes were not necessarily moa-hunters, but rather that the technical tradition followed was one laid down in moa-hunter times. In assigning this cache of adzes then to the earliest marginal Polynesian stone culture of the moa-hunters, as contrasted with the later historical culture of the Ngaitahu of the North Island, the writer admits possessing no better evidence than the arbitrary method discussed above. The Canterbury Museum possesses similar types from the Rakaia moa-hunters' camp (where von Haast tended to assign them to later “Maori” inhabitants), and from Sumner, with its general moa-hunter association. The Otago Museum contains convincing examples of these two characteristic moa-hunter adze-types, notably the three large adzes found by Sir Frederick Chapman at the Shag river, and later discoveries by Teviotdale at the Shag, Waitaki, Papatowai, and other Otago moa-hunter sites (1). Broad-bladed, quadrangular, tanged adzes often of considerable size, together with narrow-bladed, tanged, hog-backed adzes, seem distinctive of moa-hunter camps, as opposed to the small, tangless, “characterless” adzes of the northern Ngaitahu. At the same time it is possible to get a conception, admittedly arbitrary, of the general style of stone-tool culture in moa-hunter camps, as contrasted with historical settlements of the Ngaitahu, north of Banks peninsula, where their culture remained almost wholly a North Island (East Coast) immigrant. In the South Island with its human occupation going back no more than perhaps 1,000 years, with an absence of - 286 satisfactory stratified sites, and with the tendency for the same sites to appeal to successive tribes, it is no doubt inadvisable to assign such finds to particular tribes or periods. The unfinished state of many of the adzes, some neither bruised nor ground, suggests strongly that they were the stock-in-trade of one adze-maker (who may also have been the carpenter), but certainly they appear to be the products of a single craftsman of unusual skill. The two rows of broad-bladed quadrangular adzes above are obviously different in function from the row of long, narrow-bladed, hog-backed, triangular adzes below, while of the four horizontally-placed adzes, the two coffin-shaped ones on the right are different in purpose from the long slender chisel (Pl. ![]() In either case one must admire (in Plate A) the interesting variation of types, and the consummate skill with which they were roughly blocked, chipped, bruised, and ground into form. ![]() The thirty-one 1 adzes were found together at a depth of three feet in a small sandy area close to his farm, on what was possibly an extension of Lake Ellesmere in the presumably remote period when the adze-heads were deposited.Īn obvious conclusion, from this, as in other caches, is that the adzes comprize either the kit of tools of one carpenter, or the stock-in-trade of a specialist adze-maker. THE chief purpose of this paper is to provide an illustrated record of a remarkable cache of adzes from Motukarara, Banks peninsula, which the Museum has been able to exhibit and describe through the courtesy of the finder, Mr. DUFF, M.A., Ethnologist, Canterbury Museum.
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