Object Details

From:NHerts

Name/TitleIrregular handaxe

About this objectIrregular bifacially worked lithic, barely worked at the butt end and worked into a point at the front end. It is probably an unusual form of handaxe.

During the second Coronavirus lockdown lockdown of 2020 North Hertfordshire Museum Visitor Services Assistant Nicola Viinikka researched and gave her opinion on this handaxe and some others in our collection.

What is the most interesting thing about this object?
It was the world’s first multi-functional, sustainable tool and was used in this form for nearly 1.5 million years. Acheulean handaxes have been found at sites dating from roughly 1.6 million years ago to about 100,000 years ago. That makes the Acheulean axe the most durable technology that members of our genus (Homo) ever developed.

Further information
A handaxe is a prehistoric stone tool, which constitutes the longest-used tool in human history. It is usually made from flint or chert (i). It is characteristic of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic periods (ii). The most common handaxes have an almond shape, with a pointed end and rounded base. Acheulean handaxes are distinguished by their distinctive oval and pear shape.

Acheulean handaxe is the term archaeologists now use to describe the distinctive stone-tool type first discovered by John Frere at Hoxne, in Suffolk, Great Britain, in the late 1700s.

The Acheulean handaxe is named after the Saint Acheul archaeological site in the lower Somme valley of France which the prominent French archaeologist Jacques Boucher de Perthes, excavated in 1859. He had already found similar objects in the 1830s and 1840s.

The earliest Acheulean hand axe yet found is from the Rift valley of Kenya, dated about 1.76 million years ago. The earliest handaxe technology outside of Africa was identified at two cave sites in Spain about 900,000 years ago.

Early handaxes have been associated with our hominid ancestor Homo erectus in Africa and Europe. The later ones seem to be associated with both H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis. Several hundred thousand handaxes have been recorded from the Old World, including Africa, Europe, and Asia.

These hand axes obviously bear no resemblance to the modern-day tool we describe as an axe but there is evidence - in the form of telltale microscopic damage to the handaxe edges and surfaces - that these objects were used for slicing, scraping, and some woodworking activities. Handaxes also served as sources of raw material (in strict archaeological terms, they were cores) from which new, smaller cutting tools (flakes) were struck.

Acheulean tools were made of stone with good fracture characteristics, including chalcedony, jasper, and flint; in regions lacking these, quartzite might be used. During the Acheulean period, which lasted from 1.5 million to 200,000 years ago, the presence of good tool stone may have been a factor in the distribution of early humans.

Flake tools were shaped by flaking off small particles, or by breaking off a large flake which was then used as the tool. They could be used as knives or chipped to make side-scrapers (for working with hides and wood), burins (a flint tool with a chisel point) or other implements.

i) Chert is a fine-grained, sedimentary rock
ii) The Palaeolithic is the period from about 3.3 million years ago, to the end of the Pleistocene, about 11,650 years ago.

Date Made424,000-365,000 years ago

PeriodLower Palaeolithic (750,000-150,000 BC)

Medium and MaterialsStone | Lithics

Named CollectionHitchin Museum

Credit LineTransferred to Letchworth Museum in 1976

Object TypeHandaxe

Object number68

Copyright LicenceAll rights reserved