Cook Islands Adze (Toki)
Stone-bladed adze of the Cook Islands, ground from fine-grained basalt and lashed to a wooden handle with sennit, used to fell and shape the timber for canoes, houses, war clubs and carvings. The toki was the essential tool of the master craftsman, and the quarries that supplied the prized basalt — above all the great quarry on Mangaia — were controlled by chiefly families and treated as resources of mana. Fine adzes were treasured heirlooms, their lashing and finish a mark of the carver's standing, and the same tool type, its design carried by voyagers across the Pacific, appears in the found