The longest-running ongoing archaeological scientific research project in the UK

The South West Federation of Museums and Art Galleries was established in the 1931 by a group of curators in museums to promote a culture of shared learning among museums in South West England. In time, the SW Fed was one of nine regional museum groups, of which two others, the South and East Museums Federation (established as the South Midlands Museums Federation) and the London Museums Group, are active today.

In 1946, the South West Implement Petrology Group (SWIPG) was set up as a sub-committee of the SW Fed. Its founder members are listed below.

Dr Robert Churchill Blackie, Curator, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter (retired 1968).

Mrs Elsie M Clifford (1886-1976), distinguished independent archaeologist working mainly on prehistoric and Roman sites in Gloucestershire.

Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Douglas Drew, Curator of Dorset County Museum and Secretary to the Dorset Natural History and Archaeology Society from 1934 until his death in 1956.

Alexander Keiller (1889-1955), Committee Chair.  Scottish archaeologist, pioneering aerial photographer, businessman (marmalade magnate) and philanthropist. He purchased and worked on the prehistoric site at Avebury in Wiltshire, where the Alexander Keiller Museum is named after him.

Harold St George Gray (1872-1963), an archaeologist involved in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and later the secretary-librarian-curator of the Museum for the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society. He excavated at various sites in the South West of England, including Glastonbury Lake Village, Avebury, and Windmill Hill.

Dr Frederick Stretton Wallis (?1895-1979), Curator of geology and later Director of Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery.

The committee members began a project analysing igneous stone tools in their respective collections and those found in new excavations, which over time helped them to define the origins of petrological groups based on samples with the same attributes.

They used the technique of ‘thin-sectioning’, taking a sample slice from every tool, which they analysed under a microscope to identify the minerals that make up the stone. By comparing all the samples over the years, the project has been able to find out a significant amount about the source of these types of implement. The analysis of every axe sampled has been meticulously recorded on index cards, along with the find location and date, with a drawing of the implement on the reverse.

The axe-heads are returned to their museum or individual owners, but the collection of thin-sections, currently at well over 2,000 samples, are kept in trust on behalf of the museum community in the south west (currently in the care of the South West Heritage Trust in Taunton) for public reference. Thanks to a grant from Historic England, the catalogue can be viewed online at StoneAxes.org.uk.

About four or five new axes are sent for sampling every year to Camborne School of Mines, part of the Department of Earth and Environmental Studies of the University of Exeter. The expertise of Associate Professor Jens Andersen and his colleagues is invaluable to the SWIPG’s work in processing and identifying samples.

The SWIPG’s first report was published in 1941, and additional reports have been published at intervals ever since, in what is believed to be the longest-running ongoing archaeological scientific research project in the UK. They have continued to make a major contribution to understanding how extensive contacts were across Britain and even across north west Europe in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. Two conclusions can be made: firstly, only a few sources of stone were selected by the prehistoric axe makers and secondly, the axes made from those rocks were transported, sometimes great distances, by complex exchange networks.

Chronology

1941: First Report

Alexander Keiller, Stuart Piggott and F.S. Wallis, First Report of the Sub-Committee of the South-Western Group of Museums and Art Galleries on the Petrological Identification of Stone Axes, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, Vol. 7, 1941, pp. 50–72.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0079497X00020272

Extract: “For many years past on both formal and informal occasions, archaeologists and others, including Mr W. F. Grimes (1932 and 1935) and Dr F. J. North (1938), have been stressing the importance of a scientific examination of the numerous stone axes in public and private collections. It has been urged that an exact determination of the rock material and its original provenance, together with a knowledge of the locality at which the tool was found, would lead to far wider and more exact information concerning early trade routes and other factors of economic and social importance in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age times.

A major hindrance to the realisation of these anticipations lay with owners who required the petrologist to identify the rocks by macroscopical characters alone. It was of little avail for the geologist to point out that grinding, polishing and patination had often obliterated the few surface features available and that even if fracturing of the specimen were allowed, no real progress could be made until a thin section of the axe was obtained.”

1947: Second Report

J.F.S. Stone and F.S. Wallis, Second Report of the Sub-Committee of the South-Western Group of Museums and Art Galleries on the petrological identification of stone axes. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, Vol 13, 1947, pp. 47-55.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0079497X00019629

1951: Third Report       

J.F.S. Stone and F.S. Wallis, Third Report of the Sub-Committee of the South-Western Group of Museums and Art Galleries on the Petrological Identification of Stone Axes, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, Vol. 17, Issue 2, 1951, pp. 99-158.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0079497X00018636

1952: Implement Petrology Committee

In 1952 a national Implement Petrology Committee was established, including key figures such as F.S. Wallis, F.J. North, and W.F. Grimes. The IPC built on the foundations laid by the South West Implement Petrology Group.

1962: Fourth Report    

E.D. Evens, Leslie V Grinsell, Stuart Piggott and F.S. Wallis, Fourth Report of the Sub-Committee of the South-Western Group of Museums and Art Galleries on the Petrological Identification of Stone Axes, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, Vol 28, 1962, pp. 209-266.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0079497X00015723

1972: Fifth Report

E.D. Evens, I.F. Smith and F.S. Wallis, The petrological identification of stone implements from South-Western England: fifth report of the sub-committee of the SW Federation of Museums and Art Galleries, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, Vol 38, 1972, pp. 235-275.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0079497X00012135

The first five reports were concerned primarily with stone implements from SW England, but also included those from other parts of the British Isles.

Since the early 1960s, when a series of regional implement petrology surveys was set up under the aegis of the Council for British Archaeology, the Committee’s work has been confined to the South-West (for administrative purposes comprising the seven counties of Berkshire, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire, together with the Channel Islands.)

1979: Stone Axe Studies

W.A. Cummins and T.H. McK. Clough, eds., Stone Axe Studies, archaeological, petrological, experimental and ethnographic, Council for British Archaeology, Research Report no. 23, 1979.

Published papers from The Implement Petrology Committee’s 1977 conference

https://doi.org/10.5284/1081696

1988: Stone Axe Studies 2

W.A. Cummins and T.H. McK. Clough, eds. (1988). Stone axe studies, volume 2. The petrology of prehistoric stone implements from the British Isles, Council for British Archaeology, Research Report no. 67.

https://doi.org/10.5284/1081739

1988: Sixth Report

R.V. Davis, Hilary Howard and Isobel F. Smith, ‘The petrological identification of stone implements from south-west England: sixth report’ in W.A. Cummins and T.H. McK. Clough, eds. (1988). Stone axe studies, Vol. 2. The petrology of prehistoric stone implements from the British Isles, (14-20).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5284/1081739

2011: Stone Axe Studies 3

Vin Davis and Mark Edmonds, Stone Axe Studies 3, Oxbow Books (2011). Following a Symposium on stone tool studies in the Department of Archaeology, the University of York (2007).

https://www.oxbowbooks.com/9781842174210/stone-axe-studies-iii/

Forthcoming

Andy M Jones, Tom Cadbury, David Dawson, Henrietta Quinnell and Anna Tyacke (eds) (2025), Sourcing prehistoric materials – new perspectives (Bicester, Archaeopress, 2025).

Contains 17 papers from an on-line conference held in memory of Dr Joan Taylor, Chair of the SW Implement Petrology Group from 1997 to 2019, in November 2022, and includes the draft atlas of stone axe-heads by Mik Markham. The principal editor, Andy Jones, sadly died in September 2025 while the volume was in preparation.

Pre-order at https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781805830962.

With thanks to David Dawson, Chair of the South West Implement Petrology Group since 2019.