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Why does everyone call every stone tool a hand axe? Drove me nuts at a site in Ohio
I volunteer with a local archaeology group and we were cataloging finds from a site near Chillicothe, Ohio, and I swear half the volunteers kept labeling every chunky biface as a hand axe. The thing is, actual hand axes are pretty rare in North America, and what we were pulling out of that 1,200 year old layer were mostly crude choppers and preforms. I know this because our site lead, a guy named Dave who has done this for 22 years, sat us down and showed us the difference using a reference collection from the Cleveland museum. It matters because bad labels mess up the site report and then other researchers build on wrong info. If you are new to identifying lithics, please ask before you write it down. Has anyone else run into this at their local digs, or is it just the volunteers around here?
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