Descriptions

The patu onewa is often considered a hand-club of secondary interest due to the remarkable colour and patterning of the greenstone clubs. However, its painstaking grinding out from greywacke achieved a polish on the fine-grained stone which brought out its purplish undertones and the speckling of white crystals which, in finer examples like E1633, can make its surface resemble a starry night sky. It is no coincidence that the prototypical handclubs excavated from archaic Maori sites of the early 2nd Millennium AD are grey stone clubs of greywacke or basalt; the style of 18th and 19th century examples represents the culmination of centuries of careful refinement in artefact style and stoneworking technique, which only latterly diversified into more ornamental stones.


This object is not on display.