Stone Age Tenerian Culture Celt Axe

Comprising twenty transverse style arrowheads. 149 grams total, 30-47 mm



From Grotte des Pigeons in Taforalt, Morocco. From the Arthur Halcrow Versage collection, Reigate, Surrey, UK.

The tang would have been inserted into a split handle or shaft material, like wood or bone, and then bound in position with cord, or with a binding agent which would have harden to form a permanent bond. The Aterian is the name given to a distinctive stone tool industry made by anatomically modern humans between about 80,000 and 40,000 years ago. The tools are found on sites in northern Africa between the Atlantic coast to the Kharga Oasis and the western edge of the Nile River Basin. The manufacturing process for these tools is derived from the earlier Mousterian methods for working stone, using prepared and shaped cores from which were struck off large flakes which were then often unifacially trimmed into the desired tool shapes. They continued with the same basic stone working processes, but with a major conceptual difference. The Aterian style tools are the first to have clearly been designed and manufactured to be mounted on handles, with the projectile points and the scrapers having distinctive prepared tangs at the base of the tool or projectile point.

Pecked and ground with a curved cutting edge and a narrow rounded butt. 285 grams, 11.1 cm



From the Tenera Region, South Central Sahara. From a private French collection formed in the 1960s-1970s.

With rounded butt and convex sides, pierced for attachment to the handle. 921 grams, 18 cm



Found near Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK, by the vendor's father. Property of a Suffolk lady.

Axe-hammers like this one were used in felling trees to create fields from the natural woodland, and in shaping timber for building. The great number of stone axes and axe-hammers from Nordic European areas are a measure of how densely populated some parts of the Europe had become by five thousand years ago.