Identifying flaked stone tools
Greeting programs!
Malt monkey your helpful Australian archaeologist here. Having spent a decade in the field in Western Australia and recording around ~1 million flaked stone tools, i thought I'd share some useful diagrams to help those trying to identify flake stone artefacts.
While formal tools, such as points, blades, adzes, scrapers, hand axes, awls, and many others can be easier to identify as artefacts due to their tertiary retouch and shaping, simple percussion flaked tools are by far the most common form of flake stone tools, and often form the base from which formal tools are produced.
Flaked stone can come in many forms and while textbook cases are typically easy to identify, flaked stone artefacts often aren't textbook. Stone can be imperfect, leading to faults and fissures, flakes that break during or after manufacture, are affected by age and water, and lots of other factors that lead to flakes being much harder to identify.
For those looking for an exceptional academic resource for stone artefacts, including the physics behind production techniques, "A Record in Stone" by Simon Holdaway and Nicola Stern is great. It is based largely on Australian stone artefact technologies (Aboriginal Australians), but as stone tool production is based on physics, it is still relevant to other stone artefact cultures.
Happy to answer any questions people have.