|
|
|
|
|
|
Welcome to the Eastern New Mexico University Online Lithic Type web site. This site is intended to provide students and professional archaeologists with images of various raw materials used in the manufacture of stone tools. It includes images of stone used in the manufacture of flaked and ground stone tools. A majority of the raw materials pictured here are from regional source areas in New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Kansas; however limited examples of various raw materials from around the world are also included.
You may browse
the entire image collection, or select a subset based on lithic type or
collection location. Select a lithic type and/or collection location
below, and then click on Browse. A small thumbnail image
of each matching lithic will be displayed. To view a full image, click
on the corresponding thumbnail image.
The images were selected in an attempt to provide some idea of the range of variation present in the samples. Even though we believe that an image is far superior to a written description, please note that we do not recommend that you use these images to assign a particular unknown piece to a known sample. As numerous scientific studies have shown, visual identification of rocks to a specific source area is indefensible and not advisable. We would suggest instead that if you wish to use this site to help describe an artifact's raw material, that you do so by reference to the web site and indicate that your artifact's raw material is similar in visual characteristics to a sample shown here, using the notation cf.; such notation is used in scientific writing and is shorthand for "compare with."
Additional information is available on the ENMU Lithic Type Collection. Online lithic collection maintainers may be interested in instructions for maintaining the rocks_lithicsort.txt index file.
