Steel Axes For Stone Age Australians

In Lauriston Sharp’s article Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians, he presents the Yir Yoront as native tribes that function as an isolated society. The native society survived for a long time because they used a set of practices that functions as a patriarchal society. Such practices included the men creating stone axes that the tribe often uses, women and children not being able wield the family’s ax without the older male’s permission, and specific methods of trade between two tribes. However, the Yir Yoront’s way of life was disturbed by European settlers who wanted more land and missionaries who sought to change the lives of the natives. In most cases, the intervention of the Europeans caused the members of the tribal society to adapt

Sharp (1952) mentions that the men of each tribe must precisely know where the materials used to create the stone axes in their surrounding environment (p. 552). From a functionalist perspective, the men’s craft of the stone axes serve as an important contribution to the tribes due to the fact that they use the axes for daily tasks (Schaefer 2016, p. 12). With the stone ax, the women would often use it to obtain firewood for their “family campfire” that they have for cooking, protection, and warmth (Sharp 1952, p. 552). This would serve as another part of the Yir Yoront’s lives as the members rotate between the men performing the hard labor tasks of hunting animals and crafting stone axes and the women preserving the way of life for the children. Moreover, the stone ax was utilized to place the stronger and older men at the top of their society through the women and children respecting them (Sharp 1952, p. 553). Since the men built the main tool that allow the other tribe members to use for daily tasks, those men were placed in charge of the axes they made. Therefore, if the men did not craft or receive stone axes for the rest of the tribe, then the entire structure of a Yir Yoront tribe would fall since the basic component of their lives revolving around that

However, for all of tribal members, the steel ax sent them into a state of cultural shock through the European’s ideals of civilization. Sharp (1952) clarifies that the tool that the missionaries gave out “indiscriminately” changed the roles of the family in the sense that the women could provide much for her children without her husband’s permission (p. 556). The longer durability and manufacturing of the steel ax allowed the tribes to change their values on trade relations, in which some people of the Yir Yoront began trading with white settlers and missionaries in order to obtain the tool on a daily basis (Sharp 1952, p. 557). The men, on the other hand, who were at the top of their society because of the stone ax were affected the most by the steel ax’s introduction. They had to quickly adapt to the change in which were appearing in the family and with other