The Tale of an Axe

This was told by Chris Buco in her lecture on Rock Art in Latin America...

Prehistoric stone axes acted just like modern axes. They chopped. What remains of the axe now is the stone head, carefully flaked out of the core and polished by skilled hands. When they find their way to us, archaeologists, we draw them, measure them, try to identify how, in their making, each strike fell.

The Krahô as a group of people presently lives in the North- East of Brazil, in and around the state of Tocantins. The numbers and occupation patterns, mediated over time by violent conflicts and colonization. Time and again in the region, one comes across pre-historic stone axes. For the Krahô, these lunar (stone axes) have immense symbolic significance, significance different from their original ‘chop chop’ function. They are painted and held in ceremonial gatherings and preciously guarded over generations.

Laughter

On the whole, in our classroom laughter is a very calculated thing- a response to an academic joke, a note of sarcasm, genuine surprise on why the Palaeolithic deer looks like a fish! And usually the laughter flies over my head, due to my ignorance of the language. To be fair there is a bit of uncalculated laughter too that flies over my head.

One Saturday afternoon, during one of the ten minutes breaks in the daylong lecture, the class gathered around the little pond outside the museum. Sleet of ice had covered the pond. The last few autumn leaves lay still just beneath the surface. I don’t remember who started it.