Hi Tim,
You may well be right about the authenticity of the first sawfish bill.
As for this one, it's good to have n2s's information about the sawfish bills in Valparaiso. It makes a fair amount of sense. Given the CITES rules (all sawfish are, I believe, listed species), I don't think I'd try to bring one back to the US.
As for steel tools in Oceania, when they came in depends on where you are. Stone tools are still (or were very recently) used one one or two small islands (google on tepuke for an example of canoe building), while the Hawaiians were reshaping iron from nails and bolts very early on. They got the metal through trading with sailors and scavenging wrecks, and taught themselves the rest.
Basically, I would guess that a piece could have been made with stone tools before ~1850 in Polynesia or Micronesia (depending on contact date), before 1900 in most of oceanic Melanesia, and before ~1950 in highland PNG (remember that many of the last were contacted until the 1930s or later). In general, steel tools make finer and more complex wood work possible. For instance, the scrolls on the current piece would be very difficult to chip out with a bone chisel.
F
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