The 'Cananefate Axe'

Aggressive neighborhood residents and factory workers, a murder or an organized Christmas tree hunt – all exciting stories, but perhaps there is a much more obvious theory to consider: an axe was simply found in the neighborhood one day.

Do you see it lying there? There, in the dirt? While digging in a backyard in the Lopsenstraat at the beginning of the 20th century, an axe was found. The occupant of the house and his cousin, a school teacher, were convinced that it was no normal axe. They thought that they had stumbled upon a historical find: a ritual weapon of the Cananefates. This former West Germanic or Celtic people lived in the territory of South Holland around the time of the Romans, so digging up one of their weapons would have been a fantastic find. You can imagine how excited the resident must have been!

The news of the axe would then have spread through the neighborhood like wildfire, as often happens in small, close-knit neighborhoods. A group of neighborhood residents reportedly brought the axe to City Hall hoping to speak with Mayor De Gijselaar about their find. They were sent away, but the Oudheidkundig Genootschap (‘Archaeological Society’) of Leiden accepted an investigation of the axe. Unfortunately, a few days later, the neighborhood's enthusiasm turned into disappointment: it turned out to be a perfectly ordinary axe, no more than twenty years old (Fig. 1) The nickname would have been a reference to this blunder made by the neighborhood.