Necromancing the stone: archaeologists and adzes in Samoa

Abstract

Archaeologists are always on the lookout for evidence that prehistoric populations were in touch with one another. This is usually attainable, apart from often questionable stylistic similarities, only when a piece of the earth's surface from one area ends up in another, where it can be distinguished from the local material by various analyses. There are pitfalls, of course: even across large water gaps humans may not be the only agent of transportation, with stones hitching a ride in the roots of drifting trees (Leach 1981:13,66), but, in general, it is a fairly safe bet that foreign matter in a site indicates human transportation. The history of such studies goes back almost 350 years (Shotton 1971:571) and in the last 30 years has become commonplace in archaeology, encompass ing many types of inorganic materials. In the Pacific only three major projects have been undertaken, featuring obsidian (Smith et al. 1977), sand temper in ceramics (Dickinson and Shutler 1979), and stone axes (Binns and McBride 1972). The first of these involves geochemical analysis, the others petro-graphic examination.