UCCS receives large donation of ancient stone tools

There’s lending a hand, and then there’s lending several hundred handaxes.

The latter is how UCCS, with the help of Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Thomas Wynn, received an impressive collection of stone artifacts from the Paleolithic age ranging from about 12,000 to one million years old. The Department of Anthropology has agreed to curate the collection, and the UCCS Center for Cognitive Archaeology paid the shipping costs.

Donated by Tony Berlant, a California-based American artist, the collection is comprised of nearly 1000 artifacts and is about 2/3 of Berlant’s overall collection. Berlant started collecting them around 1998 and his primary motivation when adding to his reservoir was how a handaxe spoke to him as an art form, versus selecting specimens based on their archaeological history. As a result, many of the handaxes have a similar teardrop-type shape and design while the texture and size vary. There are also several artifacts that are “spheroids,” some of which may have been used as hammerstones to chip flakes off of other stone tools.

While these types of tools often performed functions, many have “overdetermined” forms, meaning they were shaped beyond what was necessary for them to do the job they were made for, suggesting that those making them did so for not just functional but also visual appeal.

“Some of them are way too big to be effective hand tools, and we think that they were, in fact, used for display purposes or simply to demonstrate your skill at making the tools,” explained Wynn.

The collection, most of which comes from regions of northwest Africa, southwest Asia and western Europe, is being used not only for display but for teaching purposes. This gives students the opportunity to study and learn from them in class and the potential to use them in research projects.

“For example, if somebody wanted to do a research project on the relationship between raw material and artifact form, we have a huge range of raw material in these,” Wynn said. “Even if we don’t know their age or exactly where they’re from, we can figure out what the raw material is. And the student could look at it from a technical point of view and do that, so there are certainly research projects that the collection would be amenable to.”

Berlant chose UCCS as the collection recipient in part because of his work with Wynn. The two connected around 2012 when Berlant was looking for an archaeologist to help him put together an art exhibition of the stone tools and a curator from the British Museum suggested Wynn.

“Jill Cook, the curator, gave him my name and he called me out of the blue,” Wynn said. “We talked about hand axes for an hour and he had me fly out to LA and he flew in the director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, and we sat around for several hours talking about hand axes and what we might do.”

Eventually Berlant and Wynn put together some of the collection for an exhibit at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, titled “First Sculpture” that opened in 2018.

To see the UCCS collection, head to Centennial hall where the display resides.

About the UCCS College of Letters, Arts & Sciences

The College of Letters, Arts & Sciences at UCCS is the university’s largest college, enrolling nearly 6,000 students across 21 departments and programs. The college offers 19 majors and 53 minors in the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Students can also choose from five accelerated bachelor’s and master’s degrees, nine full master’s degrees and three Ph.D. degrees, as well as pre-medical and pre-law programs. The mission of the college is to position graduates for success in their personal and professional lives, with a focus on thinking, creating and communicating — skills vital to employers and graduate and professional schools. Learn more about the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences at UCCS.