machetes,, regional styles..

[ausjulius]

billman,
thanks, but the billhook and the machete are two unrelated tools with quite different natures,
the machete is a purely central American invention.. there is also south and central american billhooks and some billhooks dressed out like machetes even , but they are two different fish.
the billhook is a fascinating tool with great variation i have a collection of these tools and related hack knives as well

but by comparison there is a lot of material on billhooks and a lot of old ones to be had,
where as the machete is seems to be less easy to collect in any range and the quality or interesting pieces are mostly in the south and central American nations.. and product of a factory nature was far less varied and not destined to the producers home country.....

so the locally made ones are really what one has to look at as a machete... and the others a re machete like tools..
because as the billhooks were made for the people who used them the factory made machete was made just for a box in a warehouse 99% of the time..
probably one can say a lack of a direct like to ones market caused this..

by the time these nations in the americas industrilized the cheap thin machetes from american adn european producers had taken hold in the locak factories..

but you look even today you can get a billhook with no lesser quality or different materials and function than one from 200 years ago from southern and central European makers , and still there is a range of regional styles produced..



.

[VANDOO]

THERE ARE MANY POSTS TO BE FOUND IN THE FORUM AND FORUM ARCHIVES SEARCH USING MACHETE. ONE OLD ONE I REMEMBER THAT WAS FUN WAS POSTED BY THERION, 12/01/2002 TITLED "THE ELISIVE MEXICAN CHICKEN-FACE HUMP-BACK MACHETE" IT STILL HAS SOME PICTURES. ENJOY SORRY I DON'T KNOW HOW TO LINK IT HERE.

[fearn]

I agree that the billhook and the machete are different beasts.

However, I think we need to remember what ethnographic is about (at least in my opinion).

Ethnographic does not mean hand made, it means an artifcat of a culture, used to understand that culture.

The interesting thing about the machete is its ethnography. There are certainly handmade machetes (gorgeous ones, even), but "standard" machetes are a product on the industrial age. Industrial practices allowed the creation of the thin, highly tempered steel blades characteristic of most machetes, and colonialism, imperial politics, and global trade meant that these blades were distributed all over the world (as trade, industrial, and military goods), based on designs from all over the world, and locally modified from industrial products all over the world.

In a real sense, machetes are the ultimate "trade blades," and as ethnographic objects, we need to study them as pieces of our global culture, not exotic artifacts.

My 0.000002 cents,

F

[Gavin Nugent]

Originally Posted by VANDOO

THERE ARE MANY POSTS TO BE FOUND IN THE FORUM AND FORUM ARCHIVES SEARCH USING MACHETE. ONE OLD ONE I REMEMBER THAT WAS FUN WAS POSTED BY THERION, 12/01/2002 TITLED "THE ELISIVE MEXICAN CHICKEN-FACE HUMP-BACK MACHETE" IT STILL HAS SOME PICTURES. ENJOY SORRY I DON'T KNOW HOW TO LINK IT HERE.

Here you go

http://www.vikingsword.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/001351.html

Gav

[Billman]

Glad to have opend up the debate a little, but I disagree that the machete is purely a south american tool. As far as I am aware there was little or no iron and steel working in the Americas prior to the European colonial period. Thus the tool was a European introduction.

Prior to discovering the Americas the Europeans had already colonised or visited much of Asia and the Far , which did have a history of ironworking which probably spread from India in the west, and China and Japan in the east into the Pacific Rime countries.

One only has to look at the wide range of ethnographic weapons/tools in the Rijksmuseum (Museum Volkenkunde) at Leiden http://www.rmv.nl/index.aspx?lang=en or http://www.rmv.nl/zoek_collectie.asp...rchfor1=parang to see a wide range of Far Eastern machete type blades...

It is likely (not proven?) that the long blade proved more useful as a tool for clearing scrub and jungle than the traditional hooks shaped tools common in Europe (although not all European billhooks are concave, some are straight and some are convex) and coupled with the fact that the first colonisers of the Americas were accompanied by sailors, armed with cutlasses - it was a natural progression to take a proven tool to the new land... which is why both machetes and bilhooks are common in Central and Southern America...

The long, thin and relatively wide blade of a machete is not easy to forge, compared to a relatively short billhook, so it is likely it was not a common tool until after a cheap source of reliable steel was available to replace the steel welded to iron methods used to produce the billhook. By the time the right metal was available the methods of mass production were also being introduced into edge tool production, and in England, Sheffield and Birmingham were at the leading edge of technological advancement in cutlery and tool making in the world...

Many machetes have handle scales riveted directly to an extension of the blade, not common on traditional tools or weapons from either Spain or England (altough this method of handling is used on billhooks from Southern France and Italy - and on the cheap imported ones flooding in from India and China..).

I have not seen enough early machetes to see if they are handled with a tang as per swords, cutlasses (and many types of billhook)....

Two machete style blades with tanged handles can be seen at website for Old Tools in France, http://outils-anciens.xooit.fr/t1883...r-une-lame.htm - the origins of both blades are uncertain....

[kronckew]

this thread needs more pictures, so just as a reminder, i'll post the picture of my silver eagle hilted acapulco style machete, made in oaxaca, which is also posted & discussed by us earlier here. Linky

[Rick]

The Collins Machetes were tempered in molten lead .

Just a tidbit .

[Gonzalo G]

It seems that the machete is a spanish colonial weapon-tool. Though there is not certainty about the origin of the name, the most accepted explanation relates its origin to a some kind of diminutive of the word "macho", the last used also in the sense of "work", or "the work made by a men" in the area of Mexico and some other countries in Central America, where it has a meaning of "work made on the field".

The morpholgy and concept of the machete has changed through the centuries, as it originally included straight two edged blades. The machete as we know it, seems to have developed originally in the spanish colonial dominion of the Virreinato de la Nueva España (Viceroyalty of the New Spain), which included not only what actually is Mexico, but also part of Central America (yes, Mexico is part of North America, together with the USA and Canada). The word "machete" itself, comes from the Castilian, which now is the offical languaje of Spain, and its adoption in the rest of the occidental world is proof that it does not existed an equivalent weapon-tool there before.

The older machetes are Spanish, made with Spanish blades, though latter blades were also purchased in the USA in the 19th century. In many cases, the blades were made in Spain but handled in the colonies. The industrial revolution and the mass cheap production of blades displaced Spain from the world markets, so England and the USA became new world producers of machetes. It was also a consecuence of the needs from their respective colonies.

I think there are another aboriginal tool-weapons in other parts of the world that, if not with the same exact morphology of the machete, they serve to the same exact purpose. But the lineage of the machete as we know it, I believe it comes from colonial Spanish-America, and more specifically, from the area of the old Virreinato de la Nueva España, though some of their modern forms were designed by the producers from the anglo-saxon world. Today, some countries from Latin America produce their own machetes, and Mexico has the more diversification of forms of handles and blades.

I would wonder if the blades from Collins were tempered or hardened in molten lead, since if tempered it would would imply an unnecessary step, as the blades could be directly hardened in molten lead without the need of futher tempering, but I can be mistaken.
Regards

Gonzalo