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A haul of Stone Age artifacts included a highly ornamental deer antler that had been turned into an ax handle.
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The discovery is extremely rare, according to experts, and likely served multiple uses.
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After use as an ax handle—and later harpoon—it was sacrificed in a ritual site.
You could (and would) do a lot with a deer antler back in the day. By “back in the day,” we mean around 5500 B.C., of course—the period in which a recently discovered antler was used in a variety of ways. Archaeologists discovered the antler within a Stone Age settlement, noting both its ornamental carvings and its use first as the handle for a battle ax, and later as a harpoon.
In a new study published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, lead author Lars Larsson (an archaeology professor at Sweden’s Lund University) and Fredrik Molin (archaeologist at Sweden’s National Historical Museum) highlighted the “richly decorated antler piece, likely part of an antler ax” as the most intriguing find among a vast inventory of Stone Age tools.
According to the study of the antler, when a Stone Age craftsman originally discovered it, they first ground down and smoothed the p bjectbefore carving shallow ornamentation. Later, that first layer of ornamental carvings was removed and replaced by a second, deeper motif filled with diagonal lines.
The triangular shapes and patterns appeared at the time, Larsson wrote, as pointed tips on rods akin to spears. “They catch the eye as they are clearly different from other motifs,” Larsson said. “The motifs certainly attract one’s eye.” The grooves of the design were filled in with a dark, tar-like substance.
Larsson wrote that it was interesting how, for some reason, the original motif was ground away to make room for the new pattern, which was likely carved by several people. Parts of the decoration showed narrow diagonal bands with hatching in the form of oblique lines—a well-known motif in the Mesolithic era. “It is clear, though, that this ornamentation was carried out with a thin cutting edge,” Larsson wrote. “The degrees of precision shown, manners of execution, and motif selection in the later set of decorations suggest that more than one person carried it out.”
Discovered in the Stone Age settlement of Strandvagen in Motala—known as a central hub for hunter-fisher-gatherer groups between 5800 and 5000 B.C.—the piece was among a tool stash of more than 1,400 artifacts. Many were left on a rock platform off the settlement’s shoreline in a waterway leading to the Baltic Sea. The antler, dated to around 5500 B.C., was discovered among human skeletal parts and richly decorated objects, including 20 pieces of human skull, engraved animal bones, and stone ax blades.
Usage of an antler from a red deer wasn’t common in Sweden, but when they were used, they typically served as the handle of an ax. While Larsson wrote that he can’t be certain the ax offered a practical function, it was likely (at least) an important symbolic or ritual piece. Still, signs point to the antler’s use in battle. The breakage patterns on the antler remain consistent with a battle ax.
When the antler splintered during use as an ax handle, it wasn’t lost forever. “Subsequently, the ax was broken and transformed into another tool, probably a harpoon, which eventually also became fragmented,” Larsson wrote. After the antler served its time as a harpoon—and when the owners couldn’t find another use for the object—it was sacrificed in a ritual zone and preserved in the water and rocky soil, giving archaeologists a glimpse into Swedish Stone Age life 7,500 years later.
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