Origin of the Kalinga Axe

[migueldiaz]

Originally Posted by Tim Simmons

I move away from weapons but would just like to say that these pictures and others, show these people had/have a fasinating and beautiful sculptural sence in building and landscaping with natural stone forms.

Yes, those 2,000-year old Igorot rice terraces are a sight to behold (it's been declared a Unesco World Heritage site by they way).

I've been to Bali, Indonesia once and they too have hillside rice terraces in there. But the scale is much smaller compared to the ones made by the Igorots.

On the head axes, I've been fooling around with two recently acquired Kalinga head axes. After etching, one of them exhibited a hardened edge, along the chiseled cutting edge (see pics).

I understand though that there's a wide variation on how these axes are made. So, this hardened edge feature can be absent in other authentic samples.