Actions

Download Analytics Citations

Export to: EndNote  |  Zotero  |  Mendeley

Collections

This file is in the following collections:

Chert tools of Highland New Guinea [dataset] Open Access

This dataset 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.

Descriptions

Resource type

Dataset

Contributors

Creator: Sillitoe, Paul ¹

¹ Durham University, UK

Funder

Research methods

Other description

Keyword

Subject

Stone implements--Papua New Guinea
Wola (Papua New Guinean people)--Social life and customs

Location

Southern Highlands Province, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea

Language

Cited in

Identifier

ark:/32150/r2sx61dm37f
doi:10.15128/r2sx61dm37f

Rights

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA)

Publisher

Durham University

Date Created

File Details

Depositor

N. Syrotiuk

Date Uploaded

28 July 2026, 11:07:35

Date Modified

28 July 2026, 15:07:58

Audit Status

Audits have not yet been run on this file.

Characterization

File format: zip (ZIP Format)

Mime type: application/zip

File size: 129195540

Last modified: 2026:07:28 12:25:49+01:00

Filename: CHERT TOOLS.zip

Original checksum: 5a09b0de2e43f4c8177ca4ceeb98610d