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Adze

Woodworking tool with the cutting edge perpendicular to the handle

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line art drawing of an adz , cleaned up by Micze
Pearson Scott Foresman · Public domain

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History

Africa

The adze is depicted in ancient Egyptian art from the Old Kingdom onward. Originally the adze blades were made of stone, but already in the Predynastic Period copper adzes had all but replaced those made of flint. Stone blades were fastened to the handle by tying and early bronze blades continued this simple construction. It was not until the later Bronze Age that the handle passes through an eye at the top of the blade. Examples of Egyptian adzes can be found in museums and on the Petrie Museum website.

A depiction of an adze was also used as a hieroglyph, representing the consonants stp, "chosen", and used as: ...Pharaoh XX, chosen of God/Goddess YY...

The ahnetjer (Manuel de Codage transliteration: aH-nTr) depicted as an adze-like instrument, was used in the opening of the mouth ceremony, intended to convey power over their senses to statues and mummies. It was apparently the foreleg of a freshly sacrificed bull or cow with which the mouth was touched.

As Iron Age technology moved south into Africa with migrating ancient Egyptians, they carried their technology with them, including adzes. To this day, iron adzes are used all over rural Africa for various purposes—from digging pit latrines, and chopping firewood, to tilling crop fields—whether they are of maize (corn), coffee, tea, pyrethrum, beans, millet, yams, or a plethora of other cash and subsistence crops.

South Pacific

Prehistoric Māori adzes from New Zealand were for wood carving, typically made from pounamu sourced from the South Island. During the Māori Archaic period found on the North Island were commonly made from greywacke from Motutapu Island or basalt from Opito Bay in the Coromandel, similar to adzes constructed on other Pacific Islands. Early period notched adzes found in Northland were primarily made of argillite quarried from locations around the Marlborough and Nelson regions. At the same time on Henderson Island, a small coral island in eastern Polynesia lacking any rock other than limestone, native populations may have fashioned giant clamshells into adzes.

Northwest Coastal America

American Northwest coast native peoples traditionally used adzes for both functional construction (from bowls to canoes) and art (from masks to totem poles). Northwest coast adzes take two forms: hafted and D-handle. The hafted form is similar in form to a European adze with the haft constructed from a natural crooked branch which approximately forms a 60% angle. The thin end is used as the handle and the thick end is flattened and notched such that an adze iron can be lashed to it. Modern hafts are sometimes constructed from a sawed blank with a dowel added for strength at the crook. The second form is the D-handle adze which is basically an adze iron with a directly attached handle. The D-handle, therefore, provides no mechanical leverage. Northwest coast adzes are often classified by size and iron shape vs. role. As with European adzes, iron shapes include straight, gutter and lipped. Where larger Northwest adzes are similar in size to their European counterparts, the smaller sizes are typically much lighter such that they can be used for the detailed smoothing, shaping and surface texturing required for figure carving. Final surfacing is sometimes performed with a crooked knife.

New Guinea and Melanesia

Ground stone adzes used to be produced by a variety of people in Western New Guinea (Indonesia), Papua New Guinea and some of the smaller Islands of Melanesia and Micronesia. The hardstone would have been ground on a riverine rock with the help of water until the desired shape was obtained. It was then fixed to a natural grown angled wood with resin and plant fibers. A variety of minerals were used. Imported steel axes or machetes have now entirely replaced these tools for decades in even the remotest parts of New Guinea. Indeed, even before the first foreign missionaries or colonial officials arrived in the New Guinea Highlands, inhabitants had already obtained steel tools through trade with their neighbors. Stone tools are sometimes manufactured to be sold as curios to tourists.

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Source and licence. Adapted from the Wikipedia article “Adze” (this version, 2026-09-22) by its contributors, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Lablypedia has left out its tables, references and most pictures, and linked it to other Lablypedia articles.