The Kim-Yal people of Langda Village, in the mountains of western New Guinea, have made and traded stone axes in almost complete isolation from the outside world until 1984, when one of the authors met them while on an expedition and began to study their stone technology. Photographs and diagrams help to describe the quarrying, flaking, grinding, and hafting techniques. The axes are made of worked lava stones, lashed with split vines to T-shaped branches. Red ocher and other locally occurring pigments are used to fill unground depressions in the stones.