Among the artefacts identified by UNE researchers was a superbly crafted 4000-year-old stone dagger from Denmark, a trove of about 100 items collected in the Solomon Islands in the 19th Century, and two sawfish rostrums collected in the early 20th Century from species that are now critically endangered.
A multimedia story about the Folk Museum-UNE collaboration, and of some of the important artefacts that came to light, can be experienced here
Professor Mark Moore, a stone tools expert who has seen thousands of stone tools from across the world, said it was "an absolute, complete shock to me" to find himself holding a Type 3 Danish dagger in Armidale. "These daggers were the apogee of flint knapping skill in Europe," he says.
Professor Martin Gibbs, who reviewed the collection of Solomon Island artefacts, worked for a decade as an archaeologist in the Pacific. He not only spent considerable time in the Solomons; he believes he probably lived in some of the bays where the Folk Museum artefacts were made in the late 19th Century.
Prof. Gibbs thinks it likely that many of the objects now sitting in storage in the Folk Museum are either rare or absent from their homeland, lost to civil war and poor infrastructure.
Dr Heidi Kolkert identified two rostrums (snouts) collected in the 1930s from sawfish specied now on the international "critically endangered" list. She is in discussions with the Folk Museum to have the rostrums put on display in UNE's Natural History Museum, where they can serve as a discussion point for the extraordinary diversity of life, and for humanity's role in diminishing that diversity.
Folk Museum Museum Curator, Sarah Reddington, expressed her appreciation for the time and expertise invested by a number of UNE researchers who visited the museum to shed light on its mysteries.
Now the Museum has to work through how it handles the objects which, given a provenance and a story, have suddenly assumed an importance denied to them through their decades sitting unacknowledged in storage boxes.
