An Ancient Maya Hafted Stone Tool from Northern Belize

In 1974, the late Dennis Puleston excavated a hafted stone artifact from the mucky fill of an ancient canal near San Antonio, Orange Walk District, in northern Belize. This specimen has never been published, although it was illustrated by Palacio (1976). The artifact consists of several pieces of a wooden handle and a large chipped stone biface originally set in a mortise haft through the handle. In 1982, Mary Pohl of Florida State University, in her capacity as the director of the Rio Hondo Project, invited us to conduct a detailed study of the axe. The purpose of this paper is to provide a description of the specimen, assess its antiquity, and comment on its probable function.* It is, as best as we can tell, a unique specimen and is thus of particular significance in the study of the stone tool technology of the Lowland Maya.