Tales of the unexpected

They found a few surprises.

These artefacts had been hidden away for decades in storage boxes.

UNE researchers gave them a name and a story.

Still missing, perhaps never to be recovered, are the stories of how many of these objects came to rest in a small regional Australian city.

Professor Moore, an international expert in stone tools and creator of the Museum of Stone Tools, says that discovering the Neolithic stone dagger in the Folk Museum was "an absolute, complete shock to me".

This form of Danish dagger was considered the "apogee of flint knapping skill in Europe". Tapped out of stone 4000 years ago, it was made as the 3.4 million years of the Stone Age was ending, ushered out by the emergence of the Bronze Age.

More than just functional, the dagger was made with beauty in mind. "It took incredibly skilled workmanship just to chip this shape out of a chunk of flint," Professor Moore says, "but it also has this thing that we call stitching down either face of the handle. To be able to make that stitching is an incredibly technical skill, and it's unique to the handles of Danish daggers from a period that lasted about 150 years – when this dagger was made."

(An in-depth analysis of the dagger can be found on its page in the Museum of Stone Tools.)

The Danish dagger was not the only unexpected artefact that Professor Moore was handed in the Folk Museum.

He also identified a small hafted stone axe collected near Hungerford, Queensland, on the traditional lands of the Budjiti people. It was probably made in the late 19th–early 20th Century. Further information about the axe can be found here.

For archaeologist Professor Martin Gibbs, being introduced to the Folk Museum's remarkable collection of Pacific Island artefacts had a personal element.

Professor Gibbs spent about a decade doing fieldwork in the Solomon Islands. He quickly recognised the origins of the material being unpacked before him, and its age. "I lived in some of the exact locations where some of these objects were made, like Graciosa Bay on the very remote island of Santa Cruz," he says.

"The whole collection of Pacific objects at the museum would appear to represent a collecting trip by one person, probably on the mission ship called the Southern Cross, doing a tour of the islands."

"There have been four or five Southern Crosses, but this photographer was probably on the most famous of them, which was a schooner operating around the end of the 19th Century. It was based in New Zealand, and would sail up into the Pacific, taking missionary boys that had been trained up out onto the islands."

To Professor Gibbs, one of the appeals of the collection is its ordinariness. Objects like the shield were not made for ceremonial occasions, or for tourists: they were part of the islanders' everyday life, and as such are an authentic window in to the lives and craft of Pacific peoples more than a century ago.

Poignantly, civil war and poor infrastructure mean that much of this sort of material has been lost from the islands themselves.

It was also poignant for Dr Heidi Kolkert, an ecologist focused on threatened species management, to find two reminders of human's devastating effects on biodiversity carefully preserved in the Folk Museum.

The two sawfish rostrums held by the museum appear to have been harvested in the early 1900s; one is dated 1936. Sawfish are a form of ray, and grow to immense sizes – some species reach more than seven metres in length. Their fearsome snouts are a formidable weapon that they use to defend themselves, and to stab their fish prey.

Since the early 1900s, when sawfish rostrums were popular wall decorations, "these animals were hunted almost to extinction," Dr Kolkert says.

In an age of nylon fishing nets, lines and other plastic pollution, their distinctive weaponry has also become the sawfish's greatest liability. Their spiked rostrums get entangled in drifting nets and other waste, preventing the animals from swimming and feeding.

All of the world's five sawfish species are now considered critically endangered.

"After analysing the snouts, we established that they come from two different species," says Dr Kolkert. "One is from the freshwater large-toothed sawfish, and the other from a green sawfish. Just to be sure, we're sending samples of the rostrums to Sharks and Rays Australia for DNA testing. They might be able to tell us more about where they came from and how old they are."

Dr Kolkert is now talking with the Folk Museum about moving the rostrums to a more appropriate home a few kilometres away: UNE's Natural History Museum. Dr Kolkert is curator of the NHM, and can foresee the two rostrums being the focus of many stories about species diversity and decline.

For a small regional museum, unearthing such rarities carries mixed blessings.

It is a testament to Armidale Regional Council, and generations of museum staff and volunteers, that these artefacts have been conserved for so long on behalf of the donor and the local community. On the other hand, knowing the artefacts' significance and value raises questions and obligations that can stretch a thinly-staffed facility.

Sarah Reddington says enquiries will be made toward returning certain items, like the Pacific collection and the hafted stone axe, to their origins.

"As a folk museum, we are here to tell the stories of the people of the region through objects," she says. "There is a local story in how these objects were collected and came to the museum, but the objects themselves might be needed more in their homeland, where they can tell the stories of those people."

"These stories are related and interconnected, but they are different stories."