Hafting
The method of hafting these implements, employed by savages, shows that they were used for a variety of purposes; in some, the edge is fastened at right angles to the handle, to be used as an adze, whilst in others the same tool is fastened with the blade in a line with the handle, to be used as a chopper or battle-axe. In some it is fastened with a withe, passed round the stone, as in the specimen from Australia (fig. 44, from this Institution) and some parts of North America; figure 45 is a stone axe from the Ojibbeway Indians, from my collection. At other times it is inserted in the side of a stick or club. A specimen in my collection from Ireland (fig. 46), one of the few that have ever been found with handles, shows that this was the method employed in that country.143 Others are inserted in the end of a bent stick (fig. 47), a mode of hafting common in the Polynesian Islands, in Africa, Ancient Egypt, Mexico, North America, and New Caledonia; it is employed by the Kalmucks and others, and was used during the bronze age. Some of the Australian axes were fastened to their handles by a peculiar preparation of gum manufactured for that purpose.
Dr. Klemm, in his ‘Werkzeuge und Waffen’, supposes the first lessons in hafting to have been derived from nature, by observing the manner in which stones are often firmly grasped by the roots of trees growing round them, and he gives several woodcuts of specimens of Nature’s hafting, which he has collected from various sources; one of these, extracted from his work (l. c., p. 14), is represented in figure 48. I have placed upon the table, in illustration of this idea, an iron mediaeval axe-head (fig. 49), which has furnished itself with a handle in this manner, whilst buried beneath the surface; it is said to have been found in Glemham Park, Suffolk, eleven feet from the surface. Even to this day, when a peasant in Brittany discovers one of these stone celts upon the ground, he is in the habit of splitting the branch of a young tree and inserting the celt into the cleft; in the course of a year or two it becomes firmly fixed, and he then cuts off the branch, and uses the implement thus hafted by nature as a hammer for driving nails. In the ‘Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes,’ vol. i (Paris, 1847), p. 327, M. Boucher de Perthes mentions the discovery of two ancient stone hammer-heads, which appeared to have been furnished with handles by passing the hole over the bough of a tree and allowing it to fill up the aperture by its natural growth, until it became fixed as a handle.144
It might be interesting, if space permitted, to follow up the development of the stone axe-head through its various phases until, in the latest stages, when bronze had already come into general use for weapons, we find it furnished with a hole through the middle for the insertion of the handle. It may, I think, be safely said that—although nature furnishes numerous examples, in many classes of rocks, and especially in flints, of stones perforated with holes, and although they appear to have attracted the notice of the aborigines of many countries by the peculiar superstitious reverence which is often found to be attached to such stones when found in the soil—this mode of fastening stone implements in their handles did not come into use until late in the stone age, and that even in the bronze age it was but little employed.