Digging stick

In archaeology and anthropology, a digging stick, or sometimes yam stick, is a wooden implement used primarily by subsistence-based cultures to dig out underground food such as roots and tubers or burrowing animals and anthills. The stick may also have other uses in hunting or general domestic tasks.

They are common to the Indigenous Australians but also other peoples worldwide. The tool normally consists of little more than a sturdy stick which has been shaped or sharpened and perhaps hardened by being placed temporarily in a fire. Fashioned with handles for pulling or pushing, it forms a prehistoric plow, and is also a precursor of most modern agricultural handtools.

It is a simple device, and has to be tough and hardy in order not to break.

In Mexico and the Mesoamerican region, the digging stick was the most important agricultural tool throughout the region.

The coa stick normally flares out into a triangle at the end and is used for cultivating maize. It is still used for agriculture in some indigenous communities, with some newer 20th-century versions having the addition of a little metal tip.

Other digging sticks, according to Native Americans of the Columbia Plateau, have been used since time immemorial to gather edible roots like balsamroot, bitterroot, camas, and varieties of biscuitroot. Typical digging sticks were and are still about 2 to 3 feet in length, usually slightly arched, with the bottom tip shaved off at an angle. A 5 to 8 inch cross-piece made of antler, bone, or wood was fitted perpendicularly over the top of the stick, allowing the use of two hands to drive the tool into the ground. Since contact with the Europeans in the 19th century, Native Americans have also adapted the use of a metal in making digging sticks.

The most common digging stick found in Ethiopia is the ankassay in Amharic, a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia and the second-most spoken Semitic language in the world. The ankassay is a single shaft that is about 4–5 feet in length with a socket-hafted pointed iron blade as the tip.

...
Wikipedia