The Stone Age of Samoa is much closer in time to the people of the island archipelago than it is to the descendants of the hunters and gatherers of prehistoric Europe, says Galumalemana Steven Percival.

Galumalemana, a researcher of Samoa’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage who also makes to’i fafau, hafted stone adzes, is currently on the island of Gotland in Sweden. He says there are many similarities between Gotland, the Pearl of the Baltic Sea, and Samoa, the Pearl of the Pacific. Gotland was an important trading post at the time of the Vikings. 

Both countries had a deep knowledge of seafaring and astronomy. The islands are also similar in size with Samoa only slightly smaller at 89 per cent of the land mass of Gotland. But when it comes to archaeology, Galumalemana said there are also marked differences, the foremost of which references the Stone Age, when the people in these islands last made and used stone tools. 

Archaeology has provided meaningful links between Gotland and Samoa, according to Galumalemana. The Linnaeus-Palme exchange between the National University of Samoa (NUS) and Gotland University provided opportunities for students and faculty to advance their knowledge in each other’s countries. 

In Samoa, the ancient and mysterious truncated stone pyramid known as Pulemelei, was of particular interest, with intensive research initiated in 2002. “The Pulemelei Investigations” published from that research, currently provides the most detailed analysis of this site that has pre-mound settlement activity dated to before the birth of Christ. Thanks to the work of Professor Helene Martinsson-Wallin and her colleagues, the exchange program led to the teaching of Archaeology at the NUS.

In the first chapter of The Pulemelei Investigations, Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi writes: “I believe that the findings from Pulemelei will provide useful information that will help address many questions about the connections between traditional mythology and contemporary society. Already the carbon-dating has opened avenues to new insights and perspectives. It also opens visions of so‘o (connection or connecting) between the Polynesian fanauga (family) – from Hawaii to Tahiti to Rapanui. All, I hope, can gather one day at a connection festival at Pulemelei to celebrate common heritage.” 

The Museum of Cultural History in Visby has a collection of stone tools dating to 7500 – 6000 BC in the more commonly known Stone Age of Europe that stretches back ten millennia.

“The most common artefact from the Stone Age is the stone axe that comes in a variety of shapes and sizes and was used as tools, weapons or for ceremonial purposes,” reads information the museum has posted in front of the ancient collection.

In Samoa, the most common stone tools that can still be found by those who care to look, are adzes. 

“Even though the last stone adze cut in Samoa from oceanic basalt may have been only a few hundred years ago before Europeans arrived with metal tools, the cultural memory of how these important tools were made has been lost,” explains Galumalemana. 

The technical expertise to make an adze may well have been esoteric knowledge in pre-European contact Samoa, the product of an intangible cultural heritage known only to a small group of people – the stone tool makers who would have passed the knowledge on from father to son.

“I have worked alongside tufuga fau fale, traditional Samoan house builders for over ten years now, and the stone adze is as much, if not more, a mystery to them as it is to me-- how they were made and how they were used,” says Galumalemana. 

And yet it is the ancestors of the tufuga fau fale who are very likely to have been the stone tool makers given that all workers of wood at that time would have used stone tools along with implements made from bone and shell. The stone adze that was once lashed onto a handle was quickly replaced by modern tufuga with a much more durable steel blade. It is highly likely that as soon as tufuga started working with steel blades, stone tools and the knowledge of how they were made and used, were no longer needed and quickly discarded and forgotten, laid to rest with that generation. Diminishing cultural knowledge can also be seen with composite bonito fishing lures that were carefully crafted from tifa, mother-of-pearl shell. This skill was no longer needed when fishers started using foreign fishhooks and lures.

In the 1980s, some 716 adzes were collected by Mr. Rhys Richards, a former New Zealand diplomat who served in the Solomon Islands and Samoa. He, or rather village children he rewarded with sweets, collected the to’i ma’a from three villages: Solosolo, Lufilufi and Luatuanu’u. In 1991, Mr. Richards gifted his collection to the National Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, where work to classify the adzes was carried out over a number of years. It is unfortunate that the collection of stone adzes in Samoa is only a fraction of this collection in New Zealand. At a seminar on to’i ma’a held at the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture in August 2020, the Museum of Samoa revealed that it has 36 stone adzes in its archaeological collection. 

In the opening paragraph of a paper written by Mr. Richards and published in the Journal of Archaeology in New Zealand in 1990, he writes: “This review notes that the present classification based mainly on shape does little to advance understanding of tool functions which, while it is a difficult subject to address, clearly merits attention.” 

“The question of tool functions presumably refers to how the tools were used, but the primary question I would like answered is how they were made to begin with,” says Galumalemana. 

There are people who are making stone tools in various countries today and many of them use the well-known techniques of knapping and flaking, methodologies involving a hammerstone striking the stone that will form an adze. The final stage of sharpening the stone is a result of many hours of grinding on a foaga, a sharpening stone. 

Foaga, like the to’i ma’a, can be found all over Samoa but where these are found are not necessarily where the stones used to make the adzes originate.  

Geochemical fingerprinting indicates that many of the adzes found throughout the archipelago and in other islands of Polynesia, even as far away as Hawaii, are made from stones that originate from quarries in Tutuila, American Samoa. 

The stone used to make adzes in the Samoan archipelago is Oceanic Basalt, a hard stone that seems unknappable to Galumalemana. Conversely, flint and obsidian, commonly used to make Stone Age weapons and tools, appear to be easily knapped and flaked. 

So how did the Samoans so expertly cut the hard basalt? Are there different grades of basalt and was the most suitable stone found in Tutuila? In an attempt to find answers to these and other questions, Galumalemana is planning to host a Stone Tool Symposium towards the end of the year. He hopes people who have stone tools in their private collections will be willing to bring them into the light of day; for the public to admire and to be catalogued. But most of all, he hopes to revive interest in and knowledge about this important yet forgotten expression of material culture. 

“Without stone adzes, Samoans would not have been able to build their houses and boats, the ceremonial ‘ava bowl, and the myriad of wooden objects that greatly enriched traditional Samoan society,” he said. “The adze is, in a sense, an important foundation stone of Samoan identity and culture.”