Four whole (or nearly whole) iron axes and two axe blade fragments comprise this artifact group. The whole axes were associated with Burial 3 (see axe) and Burial 5 (see axe). The axe from Feature 53 was nearly complete except for a chipped blade, and the Feature 51 specimen was a large axe (with a 13 cm long blade) that appears to have been recycled into a hoe after the hafting eye or loop broke. The two axe blade fragments came from the bottom of Feature 9 (see fragment) and the plowzone. The specimen from Feature 9 was the blade portion only and may have been discarded when it broke and could not be repaired. The two axes from Burial 3 and Burial 5 were complete and nearly identical in style, with oval "hafting" eyes and blade dimensions of approximately 3 inches (7.7 cm) in width and 5-1/2 inches (14.3 cm) in length.
These axes were made by bending a thick sheet of iron around a mandrel to form the eye of the haft, then forging the two ends of the sheet together into a blade, and finally spreading and thinning the blade toward the bit which was ground to a sharp edge. Sometimes a steel bit was added to the working edge to prolong sharpness. Similar axes have been found at the Tunica site (Brain 1979:140), the Guebert site (Good 1972:162), Fort Michilimackinac (Stone 1974:301), and Susquehannock sites in Pennsylvania (Kent 1984:236). Also called "hatchets" or "tomahawks" on trade inventories, small axes of this variety were popular commodities in the Indian trade (France 1985). Brain (1979:140) notes that "while axes were distributed widely throughout the Historic period there was little or no change in basic styles, which renders them of little use for dating or other correlations."
