Acheulean Flint Handaxe With Hole

Formerly in the collection of artist Tony Berlant (b. 1941).

With EU license 2025DMF0222 permitting export, issued by the French Ministry of Culture

First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone. 27 January - 29 April 2018. Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas.

The Origins of Sculpture. 27 September 2023 - 7 January 2024. Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece.

Berlant, Tony, and Thomas Wynn. First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone. Nasher Sculpture Center, 2018, Cat. 38.

Galanidou, Nena, et al., editors. The Origins of Sculpture: Archaeological Finds from the Old World and Lesbos 2.5 Million to 50,000 Years Before Present. University of Crete/Benaki Museum, 2023, Cat. 54.

A FINELY WORKED ACHEULEAN HANDAXE KNAPPED AROUND A NATURAL HOLE

Among the earliest surviving artifacts made by early humans, Paleolithic handaxes provide insight into the development of technology and form. The current example is exceptional as its maker has worked the tool around a natural hole in the stone. As artist and collector Tony Berlant and anthropologist Thomas Wynn argue, the makers of tools with holes or other sorts of inclusions must have kept these structures for reasons other than function, as they would have introduced inherent weakness into the piece.

This decision is particularly significant as the hole would have made the hand axe structurally weaker and less efficient as a purely utilitarian object. Its preservation is thus difficult to explain on practical grounds alone. Instead, examples such as this point toward the potential aesthetic or perceptual sensibility of early humans.

Handaxes that preserve such holes are exceedingly rare, yet where they do occur they often appear in multiples, suggesting that these unusual stones were actively sought out rather than encountered by chance. In the present example, the hole is the visual center of the composition, framed and accentuated through the shaping of the surrounding stone into an axe.

Objects such as this occupy a particularly important position within current discussions surrounding the origins of form making in early human history. Included in both the Nasher Sculpture Center’s landmark exhibition First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone and the Benaki Museum’s The Origins of Sculpture, the present work stands among the clearest surviving examples of a prehistoric object in which visual effect appears to have been valued alongside function.