Primitive Stone Adze

Primitive Technology: How to make a primitive stone adze

The video shows the construction and use of a stone adze.To put this video in context, the dome hut you see in the video is in the same spot as the wattle and Daub hut is today- only 2 years earlier (first started filming these builds).

Primitive Technology shaped the head from basalt using a hammer stone to roughly shape it (pecking) and a grind stone to polish it (grinding). He used an L shaped piece of wood to form the handle, carving a backrest to absorb the shock of each strike and lashed the stone to the handle using lawyer cane. He then cut down two trees and a sapling to demonstrate the time taken to use it (note-this land is an abandoned cane farm and not virgin forest).

He would say that a stone adze is easier to make than a Celt axe and is also quite effective at felling trees. The stone adze was the all purpose wood working tool in Papua New Guinea and favoured over axes by most canoe building cultures. Later he discarded the adze, demolished the dome and built the wattle and daub hut without any previous technology he made- just to see if he could..

A little about The Stone Adze

The adze (/ˈædz/; alternative spelling: adz) is a cutting tool shaped somewhat like an axe that dates back to the stone age. It can be any tool with a sharp cutting edge. Adzes are used for smoothing or carving wood in hand woodworking, similar to an axe but with the cutting edge perpendicular to the handle. Two basic forms of an adze are the hand adze, a short handled tool swung with one hand, and a foot adze, a long handled tool capable of powerful swings using both hands, the cutting edge usually striking at foot or shin level. The blade of an adze is set at right angles to the tool’s shaft (like a hoe or plane), in contrast to an axe’s blade, which is in plane with the shaft. A similar, but blunt, tool used for digging in hard ground is called amattock.