This article's premise is that examination and identification of materials from which artifacts are made will assist in collections management and enhance the research potential of ethnographic collections. A pilot study to identify the wood in 515 aboriginal Australian spearthrowers in the Queensland Museum Ethnographic collection was thus undertaken. Identification was through comparison with a reference collection at 10x magnification. Of 452 specimens that could be sampled, 90 percent were identifiable at some level, and 66 percent were identifiable to the genus and species level. The 10 percent unidentified are attributed to conservation considerations, a reference collection comprising mainly commercial species, or insufficient botanical data. These limitations are easily overcome. The wood identifications provide a new perspective on the circumstances under which some of the collections were obtained. Inadequacies in collecting procedures evidently led to erroneous attributions for some of the spear throwers. The results thus emphasize the deficiencies and limitations of past collecting procedures and argue for a more structured, systematic, theoretically oriented approach to material culture studies.