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.

Then one day, in the 1960 s, came along a German ethnologist cum photographer. What the German probably saw was a precious prehistoric axe in a group of undeserving hands... In any case he managed to take the axe away in exchange of a fire-arm. Now, a gun is not just a gun. Imagine the white invaders encroaching upon your land and lives day by day loaded with firearms. The gun was a means of defence, where there was none before.

It was thus that the axe was lost. Over the decades the story of treachery grew and got embedded in the legends of the Krahô. Meanwhile the axe travelled from hand to hand. About forty years later an archaeologist working in the region came across a woman in Europe. The axe had found its way to her through her husband and she wanted it restored. Then in 2005, the axe was returned to the tribe. There was much rejoicing and celebration...

It was not that the Krahô always waited in patience for the stolen goods to come back. In 1986, in an act of identity assertion, the tribe marched to the museum of São Paulo to reclaim another of the stone axes.

We, archaeologists, often assume that we are the makers of narratives. We build stories out of potsherds and beads, bones and stones. We seldom realise how as researchers we become parts of other narratives- sometimes as restorers and sometimes and thieves. And who knows, sometimes as fools who think that an axe is an axe.

(Thanks to Chris and more to Daniela who found for me sense in all the Portuguese)